menmu/sims 
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY 
 APPRECIATION 
 
 F.H.PRITCHARD
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 lilVERSIDE
 
 TRAINING IN 
 LITERARY APPRECIATION
 
 By the same Author 
 
 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 An Aid to Literary Appreciation 
 and Composition. Crown 8%'o. 
 208 pp. 2s. 6d. Tenth Thou- 
 sand. 
 
 ENGLISH EXTRACTS AND 
 EXERCISES 
 
 For Comparative Study and 
 Training in Composition. Crown 
 8vo. 240 pp. 2s. 6d. Twenty 
 sixth Thousand.
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY 
 APPRECIATION 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO CRITICISM 
 
 I\^hT^PRITCHARD 
 
 senior english master at devonport high school 
 
 author of "english extracts and exercises" 
 
 "studies in literature" 
 
 Appreciation is akin to creation. 
 
 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood 
 
 GEORGE G. HARRAP ^ CO. LTD. 
 LONDON CALCUTTA SYDNEY
 
 VIS- 
 
 Published for the use of schools March 1922 
 
 by George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd. 
 
 26-3 Porismoulh Strut, Kingsway, London, W.C.z 
 
 Printed in Great Britain by Jarrold & Sons, Limited, Norwich
 
 PREFACE 
 
 LITERATURE, like life, is not to be defined. We 
 may study it, note its forms and signs, feel its 
 -^rhythmic throb ; but we can never say exactly 
 in what it consists. As soon as we think that we 
 have found a satisfactory definition, there comes an 
 awkward but undeniable exception to put us to confusion. 
 Literature defies the foot-rule, and any attempt to treat 
 it as if it were an exact science is bound to fail. 
 
 It is, however, equally mistaken and pernicious to 
 suppose that because we cannot acquire the ability to tell 
 a good book from a bad one by some process akin to that 
 by which we analyse a salt or extract the roots of a 
 quadratic equation, the task must therefore be given up 
 as altogether hopeless. The average reader sadly needs 
 guidance, and the failure of some of the older methods 
 does not justify the assumption that it is impossible to 
 meet this need. It is, indeed, a most dangerous heresy 
 which says that there is nothing to be done for the reader 
 but to impart to him a knowledge of the rudiments, and 
 then leave him to work out his own salvation as best he 
 may. The result of that policy is seen to-day, when we 
 have a very few readers of discrimination, and a great 
 majority to whom ' book ' and ' novel ' are synonymous 
 terms. We are all readers now, if by that is meant the 
 ability to go from title-page to colophon with a certain 
 amount of comprehension of the matters of fact contained 
 by the print. But if the ability to weigh, to judge, and 
 to appreciate is meant, then comparatively few of us dare 
 
 5
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 lay claim to the title. So much we must cheerfully 
 recognize before any further progress can be made. We 
 have but taken a step or two in a very long journey, and 
 we cannot afford to loiter ; nor can we neglect any light 
 that wiU help us over difficult and obscure places. In a 
 former book, Studies in Literature, I have endeavoured 
 to show that such help may be given to the beginner 
 as he sets out upon his way. In the present volume the 
 work which was there begun is extended upon more 
 systematic lines. The idea is not to put the reader out of 
 conceit with a swift and thrilling narrative, but to show 
 him how much more there is if he will but cultivate the 
 seeing eye and the hearing ear. In short, the aim is to 
 broaden the basis of enjoyment. The reader will cer- 
 tainly not be less susceptible to the excitement of rapid 
 movement because he has learnt to appreciate those 
 subtler beauties of which the best literature is full. 
 
 Exercises and suggestions for further reading are 
 appended to each chapter. It is hoped that these hints 
 will indicate how any interest that may be aroused by 
 the chapters themselves can be most usefully directed. 
 The only justification for a book of this kind is in the 
 awakening of a desire for individual effort. 
 
 I am indebted to Mr Egbert Sandford for his kind 
 permission to use the poem, Listening to the Wind, quoted 
 on page 84.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Introductory ii 
 
 The reader's part not a passive one : A literary- 
 conscience : The cultivation of literary taste : 
 Mr Tulliver's standard : The materials for a 
 sound judgment : Dryden on literary crafts- 
 manship : The importance of technique. 
 
 II. Unity and Contrast 17 
 
 The meaning of unity : The main impression : 
 Times and seasons for reading : The effectiveness 
 of contrast : Examples from literature and art : 
 Rembrandt : George Meredith : Charles Reade : 
 Robert Louis Stevenson : Contrasting touches : 
 Extended contrasts : Antithesis : Contrast a 
 natural method. 
 
 III. Rhythm 27 
 
 All natural movement is rhythmical : Stress 
 and pause in speech : Emotion and rhythm : 
 Examples from Scott : The elemental litera- 
 ture of the old ballads : Speech and verse 
 rhythm : The regular recurrence of the stress : 
 Initial and terminal measures : Triple measures : 
 Rhythmic variation : Examples from The Lay 
 of the Last Minstrel : Other rhythmic effects : 
 The normal rhythm. 
 
 IV. Change and Recurrence 39 
 
 The natural delight in repetition : Jotham's 
 tale : Alliteration : Assonance : Vowel- 
 repetition : Parallelism : Examples from the 
 Psalms and Beowulf : Metre : End-rime : 
 Various rime-patterns : The choice of rimes :
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 Humorous rime-effects : Blank verse : Con- 
 sonance : Repetition of words : The refrain : 
 Repetition in prose : Examples from Burke 
 and Kinglake. 
 
 V. The Figures of Speech 55 
 
 Plain fact and emotional expression : The dis- 
 covery of resemblances : Effective similes : 
 The power of surprise : Metaphor : Dead 
 metaphor : Personification, conventional and 
 real : Examples from Shakespeare, Thompson, 
 Tennyson : Ruskin and the pathetic fallacy : 
 Fable, allegory, and myth : Shelley's myth- 
 making power : Eastern imagery. 
 
 VI. Words and Letters 71 
 
 The inevitable word : Monosyllables and poly- 
 syllables : Unusual words : Proper names : The 
 catalogue : Examples from Spenser, Bridges, 
 Jeremy Taylor, and Milton : The humorous 
 use of names : Sonorous lines : Various 
 examples : Bathetic lines : Long and short 
 lines : Letter-values : Sound-effects. 
 
 VII. Prose and Poetry 93 
 
 A comparison : Different ways of expressing 
 the same idea : The raw material of poetry : 
 No hard-and-fast dividing line between prose 
 and poetry : Poetic prose and prosaic verse : 
 High " experiencing power " of the poet : 
 Wordsworth's definition : Controlled emotion : 
 The idea of pattern : E. B. Browning's sonnets : 
 Prose a later development than verse. 
 
 VIII. The Forms of Verse 104 
 
 The elements of verse-design : Rhythm and 
 repetition : Verse-architecture based upon 
 parallelism : Parallelism of idea in Hebrew 
 verse, of form in English verse : The lyric :
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 iAPTER PAGE 
 
 The sonnet : Other developments of the lyric : 
 Horatian and Pindaric odes : The elegy : 
 Ballads, ancient and modern : Story-clusters : 
 Growth of the epic : Beowulf : Characteristics 
 of the epic : Romances : Dramatic verse. 
 
 IX. Harmony and Proportion 119 
 
 A sense of proportion as necessary to reader 
 as to writer : Length of whole and of parts : 
 Sentence-length : Appropriateness of detail : 
 Accuracy : Anachronisms : Gradation : Regu- 
 larity of rhythm : Concentration and economy : 
 Flatness and the grotesque : Reticence : 
 Salient features : Caricature : Examples from 
 Dickens : Nonsense and satire : Lewis 
 Carroll and Edward Lear : Disproportion at 
 the root of all humour : Various types : The 
 ' musical sandwich ' : Harmony and discord. 
 
 X. Story and Setting 133 
 
 The love of a story a natural instinct : The 
 ' something more ' : All works of art tell a 
 story : Fidelity : Imagination : Plot and 
 character : The problem of selection : H. G. 
 Wells and Henry James : Design in a story : 
 The development of character : Plot diagrams : 
 I Henry IV and As You Like It : The import- 
 ance of setting : Unchanging nature : The 
 significance of beginnings and endings. 
 
 XI. Personality and Style 151 
 
 The man behind the book : Shakespeare and 
 Fletcher : Other examples of individuality : 
 Style not a matter of caprice : Parodies : 
 Comparative studies, e.g., Peter Bell and The 
 Ancient Mariner : The influence of environ- 
 ment : Literary mannerisms : Literature and 
 the great questions of life : Personality in 
 traditional literature : Racial personality : 
 The individuality of epochs : G. B. Shaw on
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 CHAPTER PACE 
 
 style : The paradox of style : The vagaries of 
 fashion : Sincerity the only standard : Beauty 
 and truth. 
 
 XII. The Sublime 169 
 
 The necessity for rereading : The sublime 
 knows no laws : Catholicity of taste : The 
 sublime in unexpected places : Effect of the 
 sublime upon the reader : Examples of sub- 
 limity : Fine writing : The importance of the 
 setting : Personal search is essential : The use 
 and abuse of anthologies : Palgrave's Golden 
 Treasury : Robert Bridges' Spirit of Man : 
 The reader's anthology. 
 
 General Questions 181 
 
 Books for Reference and Further 
 
 Study 190 
 
 Index 193 
 
 ID
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY 
 APPRECIATION 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Who reads 
 Incessantly, and to his reading brings not 
 A spirit and judgment equal or superior. 
 Uncertain and unsettled still remains, 
 Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself, 
 Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys 
 And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge, 
 As children gathering pebbles on the shore. V 
 
 Milton 
 
 IT is common to hear a reader complain because a 
 book has made too great a demand upon his patience 
 and attention. He stigmatizes the book as dry, and 
 its author as inefficient ; it rarely occurs to him that 
 he himself is probably at fault. His role, so he thinks, is 
 a passive one merely. He feels that nothing can be 
 expected of him other than the ability to read the letter- 
 press. It is the author's business to cultivate whatever 
 qualities of learning or style may be necessary, and he 
 should not levy too great a tax upon the reader's patience. 
 So much being taken for granted, the reader will proceed 
 to pass an airy judgment upon the writer's work accord- 
 ing to the amount of pleasure or instruction it has afforded 
 him at little cost. 
 
 But ^there is ^another side to the question. The 
 great French critic Sainte-Beuve tells us that " the first 
 
 II
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 consideration ... is not whether we are amused or pleased 
 by a work of art or mind, nor is it whether we are touched 
 by it. What we seek above all to learn is whether we 
 were right in being amused, or in applauding it, or in 
 being moved by it." Matthew Arnold quotes these 
 words with approval in his Critical Essays, and adds that 
 what we require above all things is a literary conscience. 
 There is a right and a wrong, a good and a bad, in books 
 as well as in morals. 
 
 Certainly the reader should never be content merely 
 to take a passive part. The relation between reader and 
 writer, if it is to produce the best result, makes as great 
 demands upon the one as upon the other. " The reader," 
 says Mr E. J. Payne, " must meet his author half-way ; 
 he must contribute something more than a bare recep- 
 tivity." If one must show learning and industry, the 
 other must have a passion for knowledge and a willing- 
 ness to work, or at best he will behold a purposeless 
 exhibition of mental gymnastics that may excite his 
 curiosity for an hour, but will leave him not a whit 
 stronger. Similarly, if the writer should have the gift 
 of investing his words with sweet music, the reader must 
 have a cultivated and sensitive ear to catch the tones, 
 Carlyle remarked on one occasion that " to sit as a 
 passive bucket and be pumped into can be exhilarat- 
 ing to no creature." That is perfectly true here. As 
 readers we must be active ; our faculties must be wide 
 awake ; we must be able to judge for ourselves. It 
 may not be desirable that we should all be writers, but 
 it is imperative that we should all be efficient critics, 
 not in the sense of gratuitous fault-finding, but in 
 that of the ability to seek out and to appreciate the 
 best. 
 
 12
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 This can only be done by the cultivation of literary 
 taste — taste that will enable us to fasten upon what 
 Addison called the specific qualities of an author ; to 
 delight in a good story well told ; to have an eye for the 
 beauties of landscape ; and an ear for the subtle changes 
 and recurrences of verbal music. We may laugh at Mr 
 Tulhver's astonishment when he discovered that, in 
 dealing with books, " one mustn't judge by th' outside." 
 " They was all bound alike — it's a good binding, you 
 see," he explained concerning a purchase he had made, 
 " and I thought they'd all be good books." Without 
 doubt we know better than that, but we cannot afford to 
 scoff at the crudity of Mr Tulhver's literary standards 
 until we are sure that our own are better. To say with 
 assurance, " I know what I hke," is not sufficient. 
 We must be able to give a sound reason for our prefer- 
 ence — a reason that will accord with those rules of 
 literary right and wrong that no individual whim may 
 abrogate. 
 
 The first step is to see that the formation of literary 
 judgment is no light matter. Many questions have to be 
 answered before a book that the casual reader dismisses 
 so easily can be given its due place. We have to consider 
 its fonn ; why it was written ; and whether it was 
 primarily intended for reading aloud, for private reading, 
 or for acting upon the stage. We must have some idea 
 of its date so as to get the right perspective, and not 
 judge a sixteenth-century book according to twentieth- 
 century notions. We shall take care to grasp the main 
 idea and note how it is developed, nor shall we neglect 
 to notice any qualities of harmony, rhythm, and style 
 that the work may have, and to see how all these help 
 in the general effect. 
 
 13
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 There are those who would decry such a method as 
 incompatible with the free air of the spirit of literature. 
 They deprecate attention being paid to mere craftsman- 
 ship as a wilful misplacement of emphasis. Leave genius 
 alone, they say, and do not attempt to analyse his effects. 
 Inspiration, and not mere artistry, we are reminded, has 
 given us our greatest works. The geniuses themselves, 
 however, have never so belittled their art. Let us hear 
 Dryden on this matter : " We must not only choose our 
 words for elegance, but for sound — to perform which a 
 mastery in the language is required ; the poet must have 
 a magazine of words, and have the art to manage his 
 vowels to the best advantage, that they may go the 
 farther. He must also know the nature of the vowels — 
 which are more sonorous, and which more soft and 
 sweet — and so dispose them as his present occasions 
 require." 
 
 It is indeed strange reasoning that would desiderate 
 technique for the musician and the painter and deny it to 
 the writer. Words require as careful artistry in their 
 choice and manipulation as do pigments or sounds, A 
 recognition of this fact does not in the least commit one 
 to the absurdity that technical knowledge of itself will 
 make up for lack of inventive genius or that the observ- 
 ance of certain rules will compensate for a want of imagi- 
 nation. So also the superior person who waxes mightily 
 contemptuous over criticism, and dubs it a barren and 
 futile pursuit, is mistaken. The writer must be able to 
 execute, and the reader trained to enjoy. Both capacities 
 are essential to the appreciation of literature. 
 
 14
 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE READING 
 
 The necessity for the reader to be active and to take pains 
 to fit himself for his reading is well put in Ruskin's Sesame 
 and Lilies (Lecture I, par. 12). Hardress O'Grady also deals 
 with this aspect of the question in the first chapter of his 
 Reading Aloud, where he refers to reading aloud as one of the 
 surest methods of recognizing good writing. The student 
 should also read " Is it Possible to Tell a Good Book from a 
 Bad One ? " in Augustine Birrell's Selected Essays. The sub- 
 ject of literary taste is dealt with very effectively in R. A. 
 Willmott's Pleasures of Literature— o. book that deserves to be 
 more widely known. Reference may also be made to Arnold 
 Bennett's Literary Taste, though I am unable to agree with 
 his advice to the reader to begin the study of poetry with 
 Aurora Leigh. Pope's Essay on Criticism is worthy of 
 attention for its good sense and sound judgment. There is 
 a delightful chapter dealing with literary appreciation from 
 the teacher's standpoint in W. S. Tomkinson's The Teaching 
 of English. 
 
 EXERCISES 
 
 1. Write down the titles of three books that you do not like. 
 Endeavour to state frankly what you feel to be the reason for 
 this aversion ; whether it be some shortcoming on the part of 
 the writer or a lack of sympathy, patience, or knowledge on 3'our 
 own. 
 
 2. Shelley once wrote of a guitar : "It talks according to the 
 wit of its companions." Show that this is also applicable to 
 books. 
 
 3. Write down the titles of half a dozen books that you have 
 read recently, and classify them according to the demand made 
 upon you in reading. Comment on the nature of that demand in 
 each case, and say whether you consider the return to be com- 
 mensurate. 
 
 4. Make a list of some general principles that should guide one 
 
 15
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 in giving or recommending books to others. Consider how you 
 would deal with the following cases : 
 
 (a) One whose only reading is the newspaper. 
 
 (6) A man who reads much, but only books in which he is 
 
 interested professionally, 
 (c) An omnivorous novel-reader who will touch nothing that 
 
 does not come in the guise of fiction. 
 {d) One who reads widely but very superficially. 
 
 5. Pope says, " True ease in writing comes from art, not 
 chance." Discuss this statement in connexion with the general 
 question of craftsmanship in literature. 
 
 16
 
 CHAPTER II 
 UNITY AND CONTRAST 
 
 That vital requisite in all works of Art, Unity. 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe 
 
 THAT a piece of writing, like any other work of 
 art, must have unity is a truth so obvious that 
 the reader is hkely to miss its real significance. 
 It is more than to say that it must be a unit, and it does 
 not imply that it must be complete. There must be a 
 ' wholeness ' about it, yet it need not be a whole. Kuhla 
 Khan, for instance, has unity though it is but a fragment. 
 The principle of unity provides that the writing must 
 convey one main impression to which all the details must 
 contribute. It may be of the tranquillity of evening, as 
 in Robert Bridges' Winter Nightfall ; or of rollicking 
 boisterousness, as in one of Browning's Cavalier Tunes ; 
 or of tender regret, as in Hood's Fair lues. In any case, 
 aU incongruity or irrelevance that would tend to destroy 
 the main impression must be avoided. On the other 
 hand, the diction, the length of line or sentence, and all 
 the other details that go to make up a bit of literary 
 workmanship must definitely help. The length of the 
 work does not matter. Lockhart's Life of Scott and 
 one of Leigh Hunt's essays, Shelley's A Lament and 
 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, must all conform to the same 
 principle. The writer has to make up his mind what it 
 is that he wants to do, and impart to his readers some 
 confidence that he can do it. 
 
 2 17
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 But the reader has not merely to sit in judgment 
 upon the writer. His work is not purely receptive. He 
 has to get the keynote essential to the due appreciation 
 of the work, and, should he fail, must be sure that the 
 blame is not more fittingly laid at his own door than at 
 the writer's. He has to see that time and circumstances 
 are favourable ; that there is nothing in his mind that 
 distracts or confuses ; and that he has the mental equip- 
 ment necessary for the full enjoyment of the work- 
 Charles Lamb pleaded for a " grace before books," and 
 certainly we do both ourselves and the writer an ill service 
 in approaching his work without thought or preparation. 
 
 It is important, then, that the reader should get in 
 tune before he commences to read. He must be sure that 
 the main idea jumps with his mood. A short story by 
 W. W. Jacobs will give delight at a time when Paradise 
 Lost would be wearisome, and this fact may be recognized 
 cheerfully without our being tempted to draw hasty 
 conclusions concerning the respective merits of the two. 
 For the less apparent converse holds good that there 
 are times when the humorist ceases to amuse and only 
 the deeper note of Milton will secure a response. If, 
 when that time comes, the reader has not fitted himself 
 to appreciate Milton, then the loss is his. 
 
 It is necessary to recognize this unity in all literary 
 work, but it is also necessary to go a step farther and see 
 in what it consists. The good craftsman knows well 
 enough that but for the dark there would be no knowledge 
 of the light. White is never so dazzling as when placed 
 next to black. So we must have contrast as well as unity. 
 Indeed, it would be more correct to say that contrast is 
 essential to the preservation of unity. It is the business 
 of art to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable qualities 
 i8
 
 UNITY AND CONTRAST 
 
 of diversity and likeness, and from them to make a whole. 
 A writer who aims at unity alone will lose it in a dead 
 monotony that will have no artistic effect whatever. On 
 the other hand, the one who is obsessed by the necessity 
 of producing contrasts will achieve only zebra effects that 
 startle, but can never charm. Byron's 
 
 Love watching madness with unalterable mien 
 
 is an example. The two figures are so evenly balanced 
 that there is no rest for the mind's eye as it glances first 
 at one and then at the other. There is no resolution and 
 no finality — in short, no unity. It is the sort of contrast 
 which is, as R. L. Stevenson remarks in another con- 
 nexion, " of that glaring description which we count too 
 obvious for the purposes of art." 
 
 The sister art of painting will provide us with con- 
 venient illustrations. Let us imagine the picture of a 
 night scene where all is deep gloom but for a single gleam 
 of light coming from a cottage window. The light does 
 not destroy the unity of the picture : it enhances it. 
 It reveals the gloom that is the keynote of the picture : 
 
 As by an uncertain moonray secretly illumin'd 
 One goeth in the forest, when heav'n is gloomily clouded, 
 And black night hath robb'd the colours and beauty from all 
 things.^ 
 
 So in one of Rembrandt's portrait-groups. The Syndics 
 of the Cloth Hall, we see a number of grave merchants 
 seated round a table. Everything is in keeping with the 
 general impression of dignity and responsibility, from the 
 men's sober garments to the heavy lines of the panelling 
 that serves as a background. On the table at which the 
 merchants are seated is a red cloth disguised for the most 
 
 ^ R. Bridges, Ibant Obscuri. 
 
 19
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 part by the prevailing gloom, but through a window the 
 light shines upon a corner, making it glow with a warmth 
 that is marvellous. Cover up that patch of canvas and 
 the picture becomes a lifeless thing. The red is the 
 essential note of contrast, and it enhances the cold 
 severity of the whole composition. If, however, the 
 artist in his anxiety to secure an effective contrast had 
 emphasized that note more strongly he would have 
 failed because he would have destroyed the unity of his 
 picture. If we turn to another of Rembrandt's pictures, 
 the one which is usually called The Night Watch, we have 
 a scene bristling with arms. There is all the orderly 
 confusion inevitably associated with the assembling of a 
 company of soldiers. But in the midst, inexplicably it 
 would seem, is a little golden-haired girl. Some critics 
 have been greatly concerned over her presence amid 
 such alien surroundings, but Rembrandt knew his 
 business. Her radiance gives a depth to the enveloping 
 gloom, and her innocence intensifies the sternness of the 
 warlike preparations that are afoot. We see this con- 
 trasting note in all great pictures, whether it is a red sail 
 upon a sunlit sea or a strip of black velvet at a girl's throat. 
 Literature abounds in similar examples. As we have 
 been considering a painter's use of contrasting colours, we 
 cannot do better than note George Meredith's remarkable 
 ' yellow ' stanza from Love in the Valley : 
 
 Yellow with birdfoot-trefoil are the grass-glades ; 
 
 Yellow with cinquefoil of the dew-gray leaf ; 
 Yellow with stonecrop ; the moss-mounds are yellow ; 
 
 Blue-necked the wheat sways, yellowing to the sheaf. 
 Green-yellow bursts from the copse the laughing yaffle ; 
 
 Sharp as a sickle is the edge of shade and shine : 
 Earth in her heart laughs looking at the Iieavens, 
 
 Thinking of the harvest : I look and think of mine. 
 20
 
 UNITY AND CONTRAST 
 
 Were the yellow unrelieved the repetition would be 
 wearisome and the artistic effect nil ; but the touches 
 of blue and grey give us the glow of midsummer. 
 
 Or we may take Charles Reade's description of Gerard's 
 escape from the mill in The Cloister and the Hearth. It is 
 a fearful picture of villainy and despair, and a casual 
 reader might think that to be all. But there are two 
 contrasting touches that reveal the artist, and make the 
 horrible more horrible. When Gerard, full of fore- 
 boding, looked out of the mill window he saw the moon 
 lighting up the trees so that they " seemed silver filagree 
 made by angel craftsmen." Later, in that terrible 
 moment when the mill caught fire and the crippled man 
 hobbled away from the scene of desolation, the trees in 
 the light of that huge torch " were now all like pyramids of 
 golden filagree, and lace, cobweb fine, in the red firelight. 
 Oh, most beautiful ! " That note of beauty in the midst 
 of unspeakable horror and ugliness makes the picture. 
 
 Then we may pass to Stevenson's poem Chris'mas at 
 Sea, full of the delight of going forth in a tight little 
 ship to do battle with the storm. The air was salt, and 
 the vessel's nose, " pointing handsome out to sea," 
 seemed to scent adventure and free roving on the main ; 
 but (and here is the inevitable note of contrast) 
 
 All that I could think of in the darkness and the cold, 
 Was j ust that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old. 
 
 Or we may note the superb picture of evening that Milton 
 
 draws in the fourth book of Paradise Lost : 
 
 f 
 Now came still Ev'ning on, and Twilight gray 
 
 Had in her sober liv'ry all things clad ; 
 
 Silence accompanied, for beast and bird. 
 
 They to their grassy couch, these to their nests 
 
 Were slunk. 
 
 21
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 So far the silence is unbroken, and had the poet stopped 
 there the result would have been tame and ineffective. 
 Something is necessary to make us hear the silence, so 
 Milton proceeds : 
 
 all but the wakeful nightingale — 
 She all night long her amorous descant sung ; 
 Silence was pleased. 
 
 That final touch is magical. 
 
 These are but touclies ; a flick from a deft brush and 
 a marvel is wrought. Sometimes, however, contrast in 
 bulk is necessary to produce the required effect. Of this 
 we have an instance in Andrew Marvell's lines To his 
 Coy Mistress, where he reproaches the lady with her 
 unreasonable reluctance to wed him. Had Time no 
 limits, he says, he would be well content to wait her 
 pleasure, and after a stanza in which he expounds his 
 " vegetable love " that, under such conditions, 
 
 should grow 
 Vaster than empires, and more slow, 
 
 he writes another, contrasting this slow, luxurious ideal 
 with the painful and intrusive reality, where 
 
 at my back I always hear 
 Time's winged chariot hurrjdng near. 
 
 But he is careful not to make Byron's mistake, and there 
 is an artistic resolution of the contrast in the final injunc- 
 tion to his mistress to make haste. Time is short, so 
 
 Let us roll all our strength and all 
 Our sweetness up into one ball. 
 
 A similar structure will be seen in this beautiful poem 
 on death from Ecclesiasticus : 
 
 22
 
 UNITY AND CONTRAST 
 
 O Death, 
 How bitter is the remembrance of thee 
 To a man that is at peace in his possessions. 
 Unto the man that hath nothing to distract him. 
 And hath prosperity in all things, 
 And that still hath strength to receive meat ! 
 
 O Death, 
 
 Acceptable is thy sentence 
 Unto a man that is needy, and that faileth in strength, 
 That is in extreme old age, 
 And is distracted about all things. 
 And is perverse, and hath lost patience ! 
 
 Fear not the sentence of Death ; 
 
 Remember them that have been before thee. 
 
 And that come after. 
 This is the sentence from the Lord over all flesh : 
 And why dost thou refuse. 
 When it is the good pleasure of the Most High ? 
 
 Whether it be ten, or a hundred. 
 
 Or a thousand years. 
 There is no inquisition of life in the grave. ^ 
 
 An even more powerful use of extended contrast is seen 
 in the sublime piece of rhetoric in Deuteronomy xxviii — 
 the Blessing and the Curse. " These shall stand upon 
 mount Gerizim to bless the people . . . and these shall 
 stand upon mount Ebal to curse." Here the speaker 
 is purposely making the contrast as startling as possible : 
 there is no need to point the moral. He masses his effects 
 with marvellous skill, and the main contrast is enforced 
 by a number of minor contrasts in the oration. 
 
 At the opposite pole from such lengthy contrasts we 
 have the condensed form generally known as antithesis, 
 as where Ruskin speaks of " the noble unsightliness " of 
 the old tower of Calais church, or Macaulay says of the 
 
 ^ Ecclus. xli, 1-5 ; Moulton, Modern Reader's Bible. 
 
 23
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Puritans that, " if they were unacquainted with the 
 works of philosophers and poets, they were deeply read 
 in the oracles of God." There is a striking example at 
 the end of Gibbon's description of the fall of Palmyra : 
 
 The seat of commerce, of arts, and of Zenobia, gradually 
 sunk into an obscure town, a trifling fortress, and at length 
 a miserable village. The present citizens of Palmyra, con- 
 sisting of thirty or forty families, have erected their mud 
 cottages within the spacious court of a magnificent temple.^ 
 
 This, in a most powerful way, reinforces the unity of the 
 whole work, for the wretched huts that represent modern 
 Palmyra typify the inglorious ruins of a much greater 
 edifice — the Roman Empire. 
 
 The employment of contrast produces a visible effect 
 so readily that an unskilful writer is tempted to resort 
 to it too often. Its arbitrary use is disastrous, like that 
 of an edged tool, but in the hands of genius it can be made 
 to convey the subtlest effects and the most delicate 
 irony. It is the crested lark, for example, who comments 
 upon the Sub-Prefect's baldness in Daudet's Prose Ballads. 
 Contrast is not a device imposed upon artistic effort : 
 it is implicit in all nature, and it is for the artist to unfold 
 it as Wordsworth does when he speaks of the skylark's 
 " nest upon the dewy ground " contrasted with " the 
 privacy of glorious light " which it enjoys in the heavens, 
 or as Shelley does when he says : 
 
 Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. 
 ^Decline and Fall, ch. xi. 
 
 24
 
 UNITY AND CONTRAST 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE READING 
 
 Note the character-contrast, accentuated by a striking 
 similarity in appearance, between Charles Darnay and Sydney 
 Carton in xi Tale of Two Cities. Other character-contrasts 
 may be seen in the Prince and Hotspur in i Henry IV ; Coeur- 
 de-Lion and the Saracen in The Talisman ; Pippa and the 
 other characters in Pippa Passes. Charles Reade's Cloister 
 and the Hearth is full of the most effective contrasting touches. 
 Two have been mentioned in the text : another that 
 deserves to be specified is that in chapter xxxiii, where the 
 fight in the inn is described. The body of the murdered man 
 is propped up in the chair, and a moonbeam creeping in at the 
 window intensifies the ghastliness of the sight. Then there 
 is the massed contrast between North and South in The 
 Stones of Venice (vol. ii, ch. vi, par. 8) ; and the description 
 of Turner's Slave Ship in the first volume of Modern Painters 
 (Sect. V, ch. iii, par. 39). In Romola we have the silence of 
 Savonarola effectively following the torrent of mingled 
 denunciation and entreaty that composed his sermon 
 (ch. xxiv), and in Shelley's Ozymandias the shattered statue 
 and the "lone and level sands" contrasting with the proud 
 boast of the "king of kings." The " Choric Song" in 
 Tennyson's Lotos-Eaters presents the contrast between the 
 toilsome labour at the oar and the languorous restfulness 
 of the island " In which it seemed always afternoon." In 
 his Essay on Milton Macaulay uses the comparative method 
 by drawing an extended contrast between Paradise Lost and 
 The Divine Comedy. The Bible affords many fine examples 
 of contrast ; those in Psalms iii, cii, and cxxxvii may be 
 cited. 
 
 EXERCISES ' 
 
 I. Discuss the unity of the following works : Newman's 
 Apologia, Palgrave's Golden Treasury, The Pickwick Papers, The 
 Faerie Queene, and Hamlet. 
 
 25
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 2. Give in a sentence your main impression of the last book 
 that you read. 
 
 3. Willmott says that " a classification of authors to suit all 
 weathers might be amusing." Try to prescribe a suitable book 
 for each of these occasions : (a) a long railway journey ; 
 (b) a journey in a London ' tube ' ; (c) convalescence ; (d) read- 
 ing in bed. 
 
 4. Give an example from your own reading of (a) a powerful 
 contrast that serves to accentuate the unity of the book or 
 passage ; (&) a contrast that is too startling to be effective, and 
 destroys unity. 
 
 5. Comment upon the effectiveness of the contrast in the 
 following stanza : 
 
 Again ! again ! again ! 
 
 And the havoc did not slack, 
 
 Till a feeble cheer the Dane 
 
 To our cheering sent us back ; — 
 
 Their shots along the deep slowly boom : — 
 
 Then ceased — and all is wail. 
 
 As they strike the shatter'd sail ; 
 
 Or in conflagration pale. 
 
 Light the gloom. 
 
 T. Campbell 
 
 26
 
 CHAPTER III 
 RHYTHM 
 
 Rhythm is not meant to be explained, but only to be i 
 understood. F. and E. Brett Young 
 
 A S life expresses itself in movement, so literature, 
 ZJm which is an expression of life at its highest, is 
 X -A^ based upon movement. Now all natural move- 
 ment tends to become regular. It is not haphazard, but 
 obeys certain fixed laws. There is normally a period of 
 action followed by a period of rest ; a stress and then a 
 pause. This regular movement we caU rhythm. Breath- 
 ing, walking, swimming are all rhythmical if done 
 naturally. Only in moments of great emotion or 
 abnormal excitement is the rhythm disturbed, and then 
 not for long. In self-defence the body seeks to restore 
 the usual order, otherwise exhaustion would follow. We 
 may, it is true, lengthen the period of stress to some 
 extent, but then we have also to lengthen the period of 
 rest correspondingl}^ and the net result is to make the 
 movement slower. On the other hand, we may shorten 
 the period of stress and also the necessary rest, and then 
 we shall quicken the movement. In rowng a boat, for 
 instance, we may elect for "a long pull and a strong 
 pull," or we may let our strokes come in rapid succession. 
 The muscles, however, will resent too many changes from 
 one mode to the other. 
 
 Our speech is regulated in the same way. The con- 
 struction of the throat forces us to accent one syllable 
 
 27
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 in a word, e.g., ' renicirkable.' It is certainly possible to 
 say ' re-mark-a-ble,' stressing all the syllables equally, 
 but only by a distinct effort that could not be sustained, 
 and such a pronunciation is as unnatural as it is un- 
 pleasant. 
 
 Just as the throat imposes accent upon us, so the 
 lungs dictate a pause at the end of every group of 
 words. A clumsy speaker will make this dictation very 
 obvious by allowing the pause to cut clean across the 
 meaning of his words. He pauses, that is to say, when he 
 is out of breath, and this will often happen at times 
 most inconvenient for the sense of his utterance. Not 
 so with one whose speech is beautiful. He wrests this 
 beauty from stern necessity by controlling his breath on 
 the one hand, and the length of his phrases on the other, 
 so that, instead of destroying his meaning, the pauses 
 are made to enhance it. We shall see that this harmony 
 of spirit and matter is at the root of all that is beautiful 
 in literature or in art. 
 
 The rhythm of speech, then, is not absolutely regular, 
 but can be made wonderfully adaptable. Stresses and 
 pauses recur, it is true, but more or less freely, and we 
 cannot predict the time of their recurrence with any 
 certainty. When this ordinary speech is committed to 
 writing we have prose, a suitable expression of the mind 
 when free from any special feeling or emotion. But 
 when the emotion deepens, or passion is aroused, the 
 speech assumes a more positive rhythm. The accents 
 become more strongly marked ; the phrases more 
 abrupt ; and the pauses of necessity more frequent. In 
 a plain, matter-of-fact statement the rhythm is relatively 
 unimportant, as, for example, in the opening sentence 
 of Guy Mannering : 
 28
 
 RHYTHM 
 
 It was in the beginning of the month of November, 17 — , 
 when a young EngUsh gentleman, who had just left the 
 University of Oxford, made use of the liberty afforded him, 
 to visit some parts of the north of England ; and curiosity 
 extended his tour into the adjacent frontier of the sister 
 country. 
 
 The stresses here are by no means strongly marked, yet 
 no one could deny rhythm even to this sentence. There 
 is movement in it, although it is suitably slow and 
 deliberate. The writer is biding his time, and when, in 
 the eighth chapter, we come to the mighty curse that 
 Meg Merrilies hurled at the hapless Ellangowan, we see 
 how Scott could quicken his movement and increase his 
 force tremendously when occasion warranted it : 
 
 Ride your ways. Laird of Ellangowan — ride your waj-s, 
 Godfrey Bertram ! — This day have ye quenched seven 
 smoking hearths — see if the fire in your ain parlour burn 
 the blither for that. Ye have riven the thack off seven 
 cottar houses — look if your ain roof-tree stand the 
 faster. — Ye may stable your stirks in the shealings at 
 Derncleugh — see that the hare does not couch on the 
 hearthstane at Ellangowan. — Ride your ways, Godfrey 
 Bertram — what do ye glower after our folk for ? — There's 
 thirty hearts there, that wad hae wanted bread ere ye had 
 wanted sunkets, and spent their life-blood ere ye had 
 scratched your finger. Yes — there's thirty yonder, from 
 the auld wife of an hundred to the babe that was born last 
 week, that ye have turned out o' their bits o' bields, to 
 sleep with the tod and the black-cock in the muirs ! — 
 Ride your ways, Ellangowan. — Our bairns are hinging 
 at our weary backs — look that your braw cradle at hame 
 be the fairer spread up — not that I am wishing ill to little 
 Harry, or to the babe that's yet to be born — God forbid — 
 and make them kind to the poor, and better folk than their 
 father ! And now, ride e'en your ways ; for these are the last 
 words ye'll ever hear Meg Merrilies speak, and this is the last 
 reise that I'll ever cut in the bonny woods of Ellangowan. 
 
 29
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Here everyday, commonplace speech is exalted into 
 rhetoric — the borderland between prose and verse. 
 Such a passage shows the limit of what can be accom- 
 lished in prose-rhythm, and only a master-hand could 
 achieve so much. 
 
 Deep feeling, indeed, needs a very strong curb in order 
 that it may be adequately expressed, otherwise it will 
 grow incoherent. The stresses, under such circum- 
 stances, tend to multiply so that every syllable is ham- 
 mered out, and too much force is as disastrous for the 
 general effect as too little. The discipline imposed by 
 the verse-forms is invaluable here. The rhythm becomes 
 measured : the recurrence of the stresses regular. A 
 clear apprehension of this wiU help us to avoid a radical 
 error in our view of poetry. Verse-rhythm is not an 
 artificial measure imposed upon the ordinary expression 
 of a thought so as to produce a pretty effect or a pleasing 
 sound, but a natural mode that has been evolved out of 
 necessity. 
 
 When in early days the members of a community 
 wished to celebrate some fortunate happening, such as a 
 great victory over their foes, they did so, not by speech 
 merely, but also by song and dance. Such of these 
 ' ballad-dances ' as remain to us form our earliest litera- 
 ture. When the might of Egypt was overthrown, and 
 " the horses of Pharaoh went in with his chariots and 
 with his horsemen into the sea, and the Lord brought 
 again the waters of the sea upon them , . . Miriam the 
 prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her 
 hand ; and all the women went out after her with 
 timbrels and with dances." And the magnificent paean 
 which she sang we may still read. 
 
 In this bit of elemental literature we may see the three 
 
 30
 
 RHYTHM 
 
 constituents speech, song, and gesture all represented. 
 As Sir Henry Newbolt says, " The oldest ballads were 
 literally ballata, that is, dances : the narrative was sung 
 by the minstrel, and the refrains were sung with actions 
 by the dancers." He says further, " The rhythmic 
 instinct of life begot the movement of dancing : dancing 
 was accompanied and regulated by the beating of the 
 measure in monotone : and this drum-rhythm was then 
 impressed upon language, which became thereby more 
 beautiful, more emotional, and more memorable." So 
 we have achieved our verse-rhythm, which has lasted, 
 and will last, because there comes a point in the experience 
 of every man when the ordinary speech-rhythm is totally 
 inadequate as a means of expression. When feelings 
 run high, and the very depths of the spirit are stirred, 
 then with the loose rhythm of prose as his sole instrument 
 a man splutters and falters ineffectually until all power 
 of utterance goes. Only by the sterner discipline of verse 
 can he retain coherence. Examples of exalted prose- 
 rhetoric, such as Meg Merrilies' denunciation just quoted, 
 or the praise of famous men in Ecclesiasticus, are com- 
 paratively so rare as to leave the truth of this statement 
 undisturbed. 
 
 Passing then to the consideration of metre or measured 
 rhythm, we see that the basic principle is the regular 
 recurrence of the stress. The rhythm is restrained, and 
 this restraint gives the emotion which it expresses a lofty 
 dignity otherwise unattainable. Not only so, but the ear 
 soon learns to anticipate the stress, and receives pleasure 
 from the fulfilment of expectation. The simplest form of 
 verse-rhythm is seen where we have a stressed syllable 
 followed by one that is unstressed, or vice versa. If 
 there is an initial stress, as in the word ' robber,' we get 
 
 31
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 a trochaic line : if the stress is terminal, as in ' attempt/ 
 the line is iambic. 
 
 Of how humdrum and unspeakably tedious these 
 measures can become without inspiration we have too 
 many examples. But it is one of the chief dehghts in 
 reading poetry to note how the master-craftsmen have 
 manipulated these same conventional measures to 
 achieve precisely the result they wanted. A sense of 
 difficulty, whether in the idea or in its expression, seems 
 to find the terminal measure its fittest vehicle. 
 
 Uneasy lies the head that \v6ars a cr6wn. 
 
 I end as t begin, 
 
 I think as first I th6ught ; 
 Woe worth the world if Man 
 Only of dust is wrought. 
 
 In the first example the difficulties are felt to be insuper- 
 able ; in the second they have been triumphantly sur- 
 mounted, but in each case we are made conscious of 
 effort and a great struggle. The strong accent of the 
 initial measure, however, rapped out without prelimi- 
 nary warnings, strikes a note of positive assurance. ^ No 
 difficulties are seen in the way. 
 
 Welcome, wild North-easter ! 
 
 Shame it is to see 
 Odes to every zephyr ; 
 
 Ne'er a verse to thee. 
 
 G6d for King Chdrles ! Pym and such cdrles 
 To the devil that prompts 'em their treasonous paries ! 
 
 It is the declaration of a strong faith that knows nothing 
 of doubt. It is interesting, from this point of view, to 
 
 ^ Yet Shelley, as Lafcadio Hearn points out, could wring an expres- 
 sion of regret even out of the trochaic measure. See the exquisite 
 song beginning : " Rarely, rarely, coincst thou. Spirit of Delight." 
 
 32
 
 RHYTHM 
 
 take Wordsworth's To a Skylark, and compare the 
 rhythm of 
 
 Ethereal minstrel ! pilgrim of the sky ! 
 
 Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound ? 
 
 with that of Shelley's triumphant lines on the same 
 subject : 
 
 Hail to thee, blithe Spirit ! 
 Bird thou never wert. 
 
 The comparison will incidentally give us the key to 
 temperamental differences between the two poets. 
 
 It will be noticed that in the lines from Browning 
 quoted above, beginning " God for King Charles ! " 
 the stress is immediately followed by two unstressed 
 syllables. This triple measure gives the effect of great 
 speed ; the grouping of the stresses may vary, as in 
 ' satisfy,' ' important,' and ' promenade,' but in any case 
 a ' galloping ' rhythm is the result : 
 
 I rode through the Biish in the burning noon 
 Over the hills to my bride. 
 
 Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel will furnish abundant 
 examples of changes in rhythm to suit the sense, and 
 illustrates further what has been said already concerning 
 the various measures. The first line. 
 
 The way was 16ng, the wind was cold, 
 
 suggests labour and difficulty, very different from the 
 swing of 
 
 Nine-and-twenty knights of fame 
 
 Hung their shields in Branksome Hall. 
 
 Then we pass to the breathless hurry of 
 
 " O swiftly can speed my ddpple-gray steed. 
 Which drinks of the Teviot clear " ; 
 
 3 33
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 and the dour fearlessness of Deloraine's assertion : 
 
 " Penance, father, will I n6ne ; 
 Prayer know I hardly one " ; 
 
 and then the lines quicken : 
 
 " For mass or prayer can I rarely t4rry 
 Save to patter an Ave Mary, 
 When I ride on a Border foray." 
 
 And so we might follow the poem through all its rhythmic 
 changes until we reached its conclusion in the awe- 
 inspiring lines of the " Hymn for the Dead " : 
 
 That day of wrath, that dreadful day, 
 When heaven and earth shall pass away, 
 What power shall be the sinner's stay ? 
 How shall he meet that dreadful da}' ? 
 
 Here the difference between what are normally strong and 
 weak stresses is so small as to be barely noticeable, giving 
 the effect of evenness, impressiveness, and solemnity. 
 
 Such is the variety of rhythm that can be found in a 
 single poem. When, however, we are set at large in the 
 whole realm of English poetry we have a range that is as 
 delightful as it is bewildering. We can feel the roll of 
 the sea in Tennyson's 
 
 We have had enough of action, and of motion we, 
 
 Roll'd to starboard, roU'd to larboard, when the surge was 
 
 seething free. 
 Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains 
 
 in the sea, 
 
 or listen to Stevenson recapturing the beat of a train as 
 it goes 
 
 Faster than fairies, faster than witches. 
 Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches, 
 
 34
 
 RHYTHM 
 
 or hear the grind of the famihar barrel-organ in Alfred 
 
 Noyes' 
 
 Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time ; 
 Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London !). 
 
 From that we may pass to the calm glide of a Venetian 
 gondola in Browning's lines : 
 
 Past we glide, and past, and past ! 
 
 Why's the Pucci Palace flaring 
 Like a beacon to the blast ? 
 
 Guests by hundreds — not one caring 
 If the dear host's neck were wried : 
 
 Past we glide ! 
 
 or watch the haphazard hurry-scurry of snowflakes in 
 Robert Bridges' 
 
 When men were all asleep the snow came flying, 
 In large white flakes falling on the city brown, 
 
 Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying. 
 Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town ; 
 
 or hear the dropping fir-cones in Meredith's 
 
 Overhead, overhead 
 
 Rushes life in a race. 
 
 As the clouds the clouds chase ; 
 
 And we go, 
 And we drop like the fruits of the tree. 
 
 Even we. 
 
 Even so. ^ 
 
 And so we might go on to consider more of the countless 
 effects which, as we said, a poet can obtain b}^ skilful 
 manipulation of the normal measures. Possibly the 
 word ' manipulation ' will give a wrong impression, and 
 it would be better to say that the great poets have been 
 so much at one with their subjects that the right rhythm 
 
 35
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 has come to them inevitably. To us the conjunction of 
 matter and measure must ever seem something of a 
 miracle ; for them there was no other way. But we 
 need to bear in mind that such rhythms as those we have 
 been studying are effective only when they are com- 
 paratively rare. Our sense of appreciation is easily 
 dulled by familiarity. Most probably the one man on 
 earth who would utterly fail to appraise Browning's 
 In a Gondola at its true value is the Venetian gondolier. 
 He knows the rhythm too well to wonder at it — too well 
 perhaps even to recognize it. The extraordinary for him 
 has become ordinary, and so has lost its significance. 
 For most of us, happily, the commonplace still makes up 
 the bulk of existence, and poetry, if it is to keep in touch 
 with everyday life, must be made up mainly of the 
 normal rhythm, by which we breathe and walk. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE READING 
 
 There is a clear and illuminating account of rhythm in Sir 
 Henry Newbolt's Kew Study of English Poetry, in which he 
 does full justice to the freer rhythmic system introduced by 
 Coleridge in Chrisiabel and continued with such success by 
 Robert Bridges. F. and E. Brett Young's Robert Bridges : 
 A Critical Study may also be consulted on this point. Ray- 
 mond's Poetry as a Representative Art and Lamborn's Rudi- 
 ments of Criticism are both extremely useful. For a good 
 example of how not to do it read Mark Twain's amusing 
 account of a translation of The Lorelei in A Tramp Abroad 
 (ch. xvi). The following examples of special rhythmical 
 effects in verse may be noted in addition to those quoted in 
 the text. The list could be extended indefinitely, and the 
 36
 
 RHYTHM 
 
 student will take pleasure in making additions from his own 
 reading. 
 
 Height and serenity : The Robin (Thomas Hardy). 
 
 The booming of great guns : Sound of Guns at Sea (Henry 
 Newbolt). 
 
 The wind : Windy Nights (R. L. Stevenson). 
 
 The windings of a maze : The Rash Bride (Thomas Hardy). 
 
 The stately rhythm of an old dance : Gavotte (Henry New- 
 bolt). 
 
 The thrush's song : The Throstle (Tennyson). 
 
 The rhythm of oars : Frater Ave atqiie Vale (Tennyson). 
 
 The roll of the sea : Hymn to the Sea (Watson). 
 
 The swallow's flight : Itylus (Swinburne). 
 
 For prose-rhythm at its best read R. L. Stevenson, Mac- 
 aulay, Hazlitt, and De Quincey. The account of Monmouth's 
 burial in the Tower (Macaulay's History, ch. v) is very fine. 
 An additional example of Scott's rhetoric will be found in 
 Ulrica's denunciation of Front-de-Boeuf {IvanJioe, ch. xxx). 
 Prose-rhythm is ably treated in George Wyndham's Essays 
 in Romantic Literature. The importance of rhythm in 
 reading aloud is well put in Tomkinson's Teaching of English, 
 and in Hardress O'Grady's Reading Aloud. 
 
 EXERCISES 
 
 1. Rhythm gives tis " the pleasure of having a certain expecta- 
 tion satisfied though it is never satiated." Discuss this state- 
 ment and give examples. 
 
 2. Comment upon the rhythmic effects in the following : 
 
 (a) When that I was and a httle tiny boy, 
 With hey, lio, the wind and the rain ; 
 A fooUsh thing was but a toy, 
 
 For the rain it raineth e\cry day. 
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 (6) Not a word to each other : we kept the great pace 
 
 Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place. 
 
 Robert Browning 
 
 37
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 (c) Row till the land dip 'neath 
 The sea from view. 
 
 Row till a land peep up, 
 A home for you. 
 
 T. Sturge Moore 
 
 (d) To picture out the quaint and curious bending 
 Of the fresh woodland alley never-ending. 
 
 Keats 
 
 (e) Close Echo hears the woodman's axe. 
 To double on it, as in glee. 
 
 With clap of hands, and little lacks 
 Of meaning in her repartee. 
 
 For all shall fall, 
 
 As one has done. 
 
 The tree of me. 
 
 Of thee the tree. 
 
 Meredith 
 
 3. Search for examples of rhythm in nature other than those 
 quoted in the text ; give also examples of what has been termed 
 " the rhythmic instinct," whereby man is rhythmical in his best 
 work. 
 
 4. Examine the arrangement of stresses in the following 
 passages, and show how it differs from the more rigid and con- 
 ventional arrangements : 
 
 (a) Whither, O splendid ship, thy white sails crowding. 
 Leaning across the bosom of the urgent West, 
 That fearest nor sea rising, nor sky clouding. 
 Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest ? 
 
 Robert Bridges 
 {b) Is the night chilly and dark ? 
 The night is chilly, but not dark. 
 The thin gray cloud is spread on high, 
 It covers but not hides the sky. 
 
 Coleridge 
 
 38
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 CHANGE AND RECURRENCE 
 
 Just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of 
 Amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or written 
 repetition of these forms, and sounds, and colours, and 
 odours and sentiments, a duplicate source of delight. 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe 
 
 BOTH the young child and the primitive savage 
 take unbounded dehght in hearing the same sound 
 over and over again. They revel in a famihar 
 cadence. For the hundredth time of telHng the fairy- 
 tale secures rapturous listeners, though it is known 
 thoroughly by heart ; and the minstrels with their well- 
 worn stories of knight-errantry and derring-do never 
 lacked an audience. Half the charm of these tales, both 
 new and old, lies in their recurring and familiar phrases. 
 In the story of The Old Woman and her Pig, for instance, 
 there comes at intervals the pleasing refrain, " Piggy 
 won't get over the stile, and I shan't get home to-night." 
 The child listens for its recurrence as we listen for the 
 neighbouring chimes, and would be quick to resent any 
 disposition on the part of a matter-of-fact narrator to 
 " cut the cackle and come to the 'osses." In all old 
 tales there is this element of repetition. In that wonder- 
 fully significant parable of the trees, for example, which 
 Jotham told the men of Shechem each tree in turn as 
 it is given the invitation, " Come thou, and reign over 
 us," replies, " Shall I leave my fatness [or whatever its 
 
 39
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 particular virtue may be] and go to wave to and fro over 
 the trees ? " This formula is repeated until we come to 
 the ignoble bramble, which, having no particular virtue 
 to boast of, accepts joyfully. Here, as always, change 
 and recurrence go hand in hand. There is just enough 
 of the new to spice the repetition, the sound of which 
 is friendly and familiar and makes us feel at home. 
 
 This primitive delight in repetition, often so inexplic- 
 able to those sophisticated elders upon whom " shades 
 of the prison-house " have closed desperately, gives yet 
 another key to literary appreciation. Our early English 
 poets loved to string together words beginning with the 
 same sound — a device that we call ' head-rime ' or 
 ' alliteration.' It was a new game then, and the}^ exulted 
 in it as a child revels in sorting out a new box of bricks. 
 Indeed, poets in later times have found it dangerously 
 tempting. Shakespeare poked fun at its extravagant 
 use when he made the pedant Holofernes begin his 
 " extemporal epitaph " thus : 
 
 The preyful princess pierc'd and prick'd a pretty pleasing 
 
 pricket ; 
 Some say a sore ; but not a sore, till now made sore with 
 
 shooting. 
 
 But though the poet is no longer dependent upon allitera- 
 tion to bind his verse together he still has it for occasional 
 use, and how effective it can be made the following 
 examples will show : 
 
 Magdalen's tall tower ti})pcd with tremulous gold 
 Marks the long High Street of the little town. 
 
 Oscar Wiluk 
 
 A long, lonely, leaden mere. 
 
 W. E. Henlk Y 
 40
 
 CHANGE AND RECURRENCE 
 
 Flaming, llaring, fuming, 
 Cracking, crackling, creeping, 
 Hissing and consuming : 
 Mighty is the fire. 
 
 Robert Bridges 
 
 Now mj^ brothers call from the bay, 
 Now the great winds shorewards blow, 
 Now the salt tides seawards flow, 
 Now the Avild white horses play. 
 Champ and chafe and toss in the spray. 
 
 Matthew Arnold 
 
 But the old poets soon got beyond the mere sorting 
 out of words beginning with the same sound, and began 
 to use the subtler device of placing in close proximity 
 words with the same vowel sound. This we call 
 ' assonance,' and our modern poetry owes much of its 
 sweetest music to this source. Swinburne was very fond 
 of it, as we may see from the following stanza from the 
 " Prelude " to Songs before Sunrise : 
 
 A little time that we may fill 
 
 Or with such good works or such ill 
 
 As loose the bonds or make them strong 
 
 Wherein all manhood suffers wrong. 
 By rose-hung river and light-foot rill 
 
 There are those who rest not ; who think long 
 Till they discern as from a hill, 
 
 At the sun's hour of morning song. 
 Known of souls only, and those souls free, 
 The sacred spaces of the sea. 
 
 It is not so obvious as head-rime, but the ear soon learns 
 to catch the recurring vowels in h'ttle, f/11, ill ; bonds, 
 strong, wrong ; river, rill, thmk, discern, lull ; known, 
 souls, only, those ; sacred, spaces. Buchanan too uses 
 assonance effectively to describe Drowsietown in White 
 Rose and Red : 
 
 41
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Thro' the fields with sleepy gleam, 
 Drowsy, drowsy steals the stream. 
 Touching with its azure arms 
 Upland fields and peaceful farms. 
 Gliding with a twilight tide 
 Where the dark elms shade its side ; 
 Tv.ining, pausing sweet and bright 
 Where the lilies sail so white ; 
 Winding in its sedgy hair 
 Meadow-sweet and iris fair ; 
 Humming as it hies along 
 Monotones of sleep}^ song ; 
 Deep and dimpled, bright nut-brown. 
 Flowing into Drowsietown. 
 
 The soothing monotony of the vowel-music here is most 
 appropriate to the subject. Leigh Hunt makes some 
 wise comments upon this question of vowel-repetition in 
 his Autobiography. On one occasion " Wordsworth had 
 found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound 
 of the participles in Shakespeare's line about bees : 
 
 The singing masons building roofs of gold. 
 
 This was, he said, a line which Milton would never have 
 written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the 
 repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the 
 singers, and that Shakespeare's negligence (if negligence 
 it was) had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner. 
 The assertion about Milton is startHng, considering the 
 tendency of that great poet to subject his nature to art ; 
 yet I have dipped while writing this, into Paradise Lost, 
 and at the second chance have lit upon the following : 
 
 The gray 
 Dawn, and tlic Pleiades before him danced ; 
 Slicdding sweet inliuence. Less bright the moon, 
 liut opposite, ill levelled west, ivas set 
 His mirror, with full force borrowing her light. 
 42
 
 CHANGE AND RECURRENCE 
 
 The repetition of the e in the fourth hne is an extreme 
 case in point, being monotonous in order to express 
 oneness and evenness." 
 
 Besides matching consonants and vowels for the sake 
 of effect, the early poets tried linking together as many 
 ways of saying the same thing as their ingenuity could 
 devise. This ' parallelism ' is a marked feature of old 
 Hebrew poetry, as may be seen in our Book of Psalms : 
 
 Deliver me from mine enemies, O my God : 
 
 Set me on high from them that rise up against me. 
 
 Deliver me from the workers of iniquity, 
 
 And save me from the bloodthirsty men.^ 
 
 Here again we have change linked with recurrence : the 
 expression varies, but the idea is the same throughout. 
 In Moulton's Modern Reader's Bible the poetical books 
 are so arranged that the full beauty and significance of 
 this parallelism is made clear. 
 
 In Western lands the parallelism took a different form. 
 In an early poem like Beowulf the writer uses very many 
 terms to express the same thing, but each new term 
 introduces a new shade of meaning. As Professor Long 
 says, " There are fifteen names for the sea, from the holm, 
 that is, the horizon sea, the ' upmounding,' to the brim, 
 which is the ocean flinging its welter of sand and creamer 
 foam upon the beach at your feet. And the figures used 
 to describe or glorify it — ' the swan road,' ' the whale 
 path,' ' the heaving battle plain ' — are almost as 
 numerous." But this parallelism of content began to 
 give way to a parallelism of form. The poet made his 
 lines equal in length, or else varied the line-length accord- 
 ing to a prearranged pattern. To the Hebrew poet, 
 
 ^ Psalm lix ; Moultoii, Modern Reader's Bible. 
 
 43
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 however, this was a matter of indifference. He was 
 careful to put Hke ideas together : the length of line 
 required for their expression was left to take care of 
 itself. So when Job, groaning heavily under his affliction, 
 cursed his day, he said : 
 
 Let that day be darkness ; 
 
 Let not God regard it from above, 
 
 Neither let the Hght shine upon it. 
 
 Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it for 
 
 their own ; 
 Let a cloud dwell upon it ; 
 Let all that maketh black the day terrify it ! 
 
 There is here no metre as we understand it. The thought 
 is measured, but not the line. The difference may be 
 seen clearly by contrasting one of the metrical versions 
 of the Psalms with the Authorized Version. We may 
 take part of Psalm Ixxxiv as an example : 
 
 How lovely are thy taberneicles, O Lord of Hosts ! 
 
 My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the covirts of the Lord ; 
 
 My heart and llesh cry out unto the living God. 
 
 If we turn to Tate and Brady's metrical version of the 
 same passage, we shall see at a glance the difference 
 between the parallelism of content of the Hebrew poet 
 and the parallelism of form of English poetry : 
 
 O God of Hosts, the mighty Lord, 
 
 How lovely is the place. 
 Where Thou, enthroned in glory, shew'st 
 
 Tlie briglitness of Thy face. 
 
 My longing soul faints with desire 
 
 To view thy blest abode ; 
 My panting heart and llesh cry out 
 
 For Thee, the living God. 
 
 44
 
 CHANGE AND RECURRENCE 
 
 No one would dream of submitting those familiar stanzas 
 as representative of English poetry, but they will serve 
 well enough to illustrate the argument that our poets 
 made line-length the prime consideration, and fitted in 
 the ideas according to the prearranged plan. They 
 measured their lines, and, to aid in the task of memorizing 
 at a time when poetry had of necessity to be learnt by 
 heart, the device of ' end-rime ' was adopted. These 
 poets played with end-rimes as their predecessors had 
 played with the head-rime that had now become merely 
 incidental, and not at all essential to the fabric of the 
 verse. At first the simple form of the riming couplet was 
 used. Here the lines were evenly matched in length, and 
 the final sound of the second line recalled that of the 
 first. The poetry of Pope will afford as many examples 
 of this as may be desired : 
 
 We think our fathers fools, so wise we grow ; a 
 
 Our wiser sons, no doubt, will think us so. a 
 
 Then the rimes were made alternate : 
 
 To drive the deer with hound and horn a 
 
 Earl Percy took his way ; b 
 
 The child may rue that is unborn a 
 
 The hunting of that day. h 
 
 And after that all manner of more or less intricate patterns 
 were devised by innovators. We may see a great poet 
 trying his prentice hand at all kinds of interlacing rimes 
 if we turn to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar. Here is one 
 stanza : 
 
 Bring hither the pink and purple columbine, a 
 
 With gellifiowers, b 
 
 Bring coronations, and sops in wine, a 
 
 Worn of paramours : b 
 
 45
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Strow me tlie ground with daffadowndillies, c 
 
 And cowslips, and kingcups, and loved lillics : c 
 
 The pretty paunce, d 
 
 And the chevisaunce, d 
 
 Shall match the fair flower delice. c 
 
 As Edward Kirke says in the Epistle with which he intro- 
 duces this poem : " Walking in the sun . . . yet needs 
 he must be sunburnt ; and having the sound of those 
 ancient poets still ringing in his ears, he must needs, in 
 singing, hit out some of their tunes." So, indeed, 
 Spenser tried one tune after another until he had fashioned 
 for himself the stanza of the Faerie Qiieene, with which 
 his name will ever be associated. 
 
 In any rim.e-pattern it is the coupling of change with 
 recurrence which gives pleasure to the reader. The ear 
 anticipates the familiar sound, and takes an even greater 
 delight in it when it comes if one or two alien sounds have 
 intervened. The poet's skill consists in knowing just 
 how long he can defer satisfying that expectation without 
 wearying the reader. He has also to avoid, on the one 
 hand, the evil of making his rimes smell of the lamp ; 
 and, on the other, of letting them run away with him in 
 a careless, haphazard fashion. Tennyson, as Watts- 
 Dunton pointed out, was apt to be too rigorous in his 
 selection of rimes, so that his verse sometimes lacks 
 inspiration. Keats and Swinburne, on the contrary, 
 did not always scrutinize their rimes with sufficient care, 
 so that we get examples of this kind : 
 
 The wanderer 
 Holding his forehead to keep off the burr 
 Of smothering fancies. 
 
 Scott too was not innocent in this matter, as we may 
 
 see from this ugly rime : 
 
 46
 
 CHANGE AND RECURRENCE 
 
 "Charge, Chester, charge ! On, Stanley, on ! " 
 Were the last words of Marmion. 
 
 Masculine rimes, like ' ground ' and ' round,' are better 
 for general use than feminine rimes, such as ' seething ' 
 and ' breathing ' ; while polysyllabic rimes are used as 
 a rule only to give a humorous or bizarre effect to the 
 verse. Robert Browning revelled in all manner of mis- 
 chievous tricks in rime. To look for the most far- 
 fetched specimen that his poetry affords is not a bad 
 occupation for a rainy afternoon. Here is a good 
 example to begin with : 
 
 While treading down rose and ranunculus. 
 You Tommy-make-room-for-yonr-iincle us ! 
 
 In parodies and humorous verse such rimes form an 
 essential part of the versifier's stock-in-trade. So 
 Barham, in the Ingoldsby Legends, gives us : 
 
 So down on your marrow-bones, Jew, and ask mercy ! 
 Defendant and Plaintiff are now wisy wersy, 
 
 and Lewis Carroll, in Alice in Wonderland, makes the 
 Mock Turtle sing : 
 
 Who would not give all else for two p 
 ennyworth only of beautiful Soup. 
 
 With these gems we may class the following from 
 Lowell's Biglow Papers : 
 
 But John P. 
 Robinson he 
 Sez this kind o' thing's an exploded idee, 
 
 and this from the Sentry's song in Sir W, S. Gilbert's 
 lolanthe : 
 
 47
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 When in that house INI.P.'s divide, 
 
 If they've a brain and cerebellum, too. 
 
 They've got to leave that brain outside, 
 And vote just as their leaders tell 'em to. 
 
 But end-rime is only one of many modes of recurrence. 
 The poet who, greatly daring, discards the aid of rime 
 and essays blank verse seeks for some other form of 
 repetition to take its place. He may hark back upon 
 alliteration. He may, like Collins in his Ode to Evening, 
 resort to assonance. He wiU almost certainly adopt a 
 more or less rigid parallelism of line. And very probably 
 he will use ' consonance,' the most subtle and delicate 
 of all forms of repetition. Let us look at a passage from 
 Paradise Lost : 
 
 Ha.il, holy Light, offspring of HesLv'n firs/-bor?j ! 
 
 Or of th' E/er;/al coetevnal beam 
 
 May I express Thee uwblawed ? sij/ce God is light, 
 
 And never hut in unapproached Ligh^ 
 
 Dwelt ivom eternity — dwelt then in Thee, 
 
 Bright eff/uewce of bright esse??ce increase ! 
 
 The alliteration in the first line will be apparent to the 
 dullest ear, but an attentive reader will also catch the 
 recurring /, now at the end of a word, then in the middle, 
 and again at the beginning. While this sound is yet 
 chiming in his ear he becomes aware that a fresh set of 
 repetitions has started : the t's and the n's interlace, 
 and soon the m's join them. When the changes have 
 been rung on these consonants for a little, the familiar 
 sound of the / is heard once more, and then t, m, and n 
 again take up the burden. This is verbal harmony of 
 the highest and sweetest kind. The same sounds recur 
 not only at the beginning of words, as in alliteration, but 
 wherever the stress may be placed, giving at once unity 
 48
 
 CHANGE AND RECURRENCE 
 
 and delightful music to the lines. This is consonance, 
 and the reader will find in the work of Milton, Shelley, 
 Tennyson, and Francis Thompson a happy hunting- 
 ground for further examples. 
 
 In the passage that I have just quoted the repetition 
 of the words ' bright ' and ' light ' will be noticed also. 
 This is not accidental, for these are key-words which bind 
 the work into a whole and enforce the main impression 
 the writer wishes to leave with the reader. The poets 
 often linger over a beautiful and significant word or 
 phrase as if loth to leave it. So Francis Thompson 
 in the line 
 
 Sweet with wild wings that pass, that pass away, 
 
 makes it seem as if he would hinder the passing a little 
 by dwelling upon it, and Matthew Arnold, when he makes 
 the bereaved Merman say. 
 
 Come away, away, children. 
 Come, children, come down, 
 
 voices a tender regret that broods lovingly over the cause 
 of its sorrows. This note of sweet pathos is often asso- 
 ciated with the recurrence of a haunting word or phrase. 
 It is like opening a packet of old letters from one who has 
 passed beyond, and conning once again the familiar 
 sentiments in the familiar handwriting. Edgar Allan 
 Poe's The Raven affords a well-known instance of this 
 haunting repetition, giving a hint of the irrevocable and 
 of a sadness that can never find adequate relief, but the 
 same poet's U lain me gives a 3'et more pathetic melody. 
 This shadowy talc of " the dim lake of Auber " and the 
 " ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir " is a remarkable 
 expression of dreary hopelessness. Rupert Brooke is 
 
 4 49
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 another poet who loved to dwell upon a significant 
 
 phrase : 
 
 And a long watch you would keep ; 
 And I should sleep, and I should sleep. 
 
 From such repetitions to the standardized repeat in 
 the form of ' refrain ' or ' chorus ' is but a short step, and 
 the refrain serves a similar purpose in driving home the 
 point of the story, as well as in binding the several stanzas 
 into a whole poem. We may see this equally well 
 illustrated in one of Robert Browning's Cavalier Tunes, 
 with its suggestion of extreme haste and fiery impetuosity : 
 
 Boot, saddle, to horse, and away ; 
 
 or in Spenser's Prothalamion : 
 
 Sweet Thames ! run softly, till I end my song, 
 
 quaintly signifying leisure and sweet content. Then, too, 
 there is that most impressive refrain in the " Doom of 
 the North" (Isaiah ix, 8, to x, 4).^ Successive misdeeds 
 are recounted, each blacker than the one that went before, 
 but each followed by the words : 
 
 For all this his anger is not turned awa3^ 
 But his hand is stretched out still ; 
 
 and we can feel the stress upon that word ' still ' increas- 
 ing in force at each repetition until it seems as if it must 
 break down under the weight. 
 
 But repetition, in one form or another, is useful to the 
 writer of prose also. Formerly he used it whenever he 
 wished to be impressive : now he often employs it for the 
 sake of clearness. In the latter case, however, the writer 
 needs to be wary and diplomatic, for the reader is apt to 
 resent the implication that he is dull of apprehension. 
 
 ^ Moulton, Modern Reader's Bible, p. 481. 
 50
 
 CHANGE AND RECURRENCE 
 
 Macaulay's hammer-blows, it must be confessed, deafen 
 at times with their insistence ; and Bagehot's painstaking 
 desire to be clear makes him annoying on occasion. But 
 the following passage from Burke's Speech on American 
 Taxation shows how effectively the device may be used 
 in prose : 
 
 How we have fared since then — what woeful variety 
 of schemes have been adopted ; what enforcing, and what 
 repeaUng ; what bullying, and what submitting ; what 
 doing, and undoing ; what straining, and what relaxing ; 
 what assemblies dissolved for not obeying, and called again 
 without obedience ; what troops sent out to quell resistance, 
 and on meeting that resistance, recalled ; what shiftings, 
 and changings, and jumblings of all kinds of men at home, 
 which left no possibility of order, consistency, vigour, or 
 even so much as a decent unity of colour in any one public/^ 
 measure — It is a tedious, irksome task. --^ / 
 
 Then there is Kinglake's fine description of the desert 
 in Eothen to show in how telling a manner a skilful prose- 
 writer can dwell upon a single word : 
 
 As long as you are journeying in the interior of the Desert 
 you have no particular point to make for as your resting- 
 place. The endless sands yield nothing but small stunted 
 slirubs ; even these fail after the first two or three days, and 
 from that time you pass over broad plains — you pass over 
 newly-reared hills^you pass through vallej's dug out by 
 the last week's storm, — and the hills and the valleys are ; 
 sand, sand, sand, still sand, and only sand, and sand, and 
 sand again. 
 
 The dreary monotony of it all could not better be 
 conveyed. 
 
 The more subtle forms of repetition also find their way 
 into beautiful prose, but naturally the writer has to be 
 both sparing and skilful in their use. He needs a delicate 
 
 51
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 ear to make the fine distinction between sweet music and 
 a mere jingle. Ruskin and Burke use consonance very 
 effectivel}^ Stevenson makes his vowels do his bidding, 
 whether to give an idea of sameness by repetition, as in 
 
 One z£;o«derful glory of fairy gold, 
 
 or of changing scenes by variation as in 
 
 He watches the long train sw^6'p away. 
 
 The writer, then, has ever been fashioning new instru- 
 ments for his use, or acquiring fresh aptitude in handling 
 those bequeathed to him from the past. He has taken 
 the artless pleasure in repetition that the child shares with 
 primitive man, and on it has based his patterns. Nor 
 is the modern adult innocent in the matter of a sneaking 
 regard for repetition, for has not Sir Leslie Stephen told 
 us of Alpine climbers who amuse themselves in rolling 
 stone after stone down precipitous slopes out of sheer 
 delight in doing the same thing again and again ? 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE READING 
 
 For comments upon Browning's queer rimes see G. K. 
 Chesterton's monograph in the " English Men of Letters " series 
 pp. 50, 152. The Ingoldsby Legends, Gilbert's comic operas, 
 the Biglow Papers, as well as Browning's poems, will afford 
 abundant examples of curious and interesting rime-effects. 
 Pope in his Essay on Criticism and Colvin in his Life of John 
 Keats (pp. 211, 212) give useful comments on the subject 
 of rime. See also Poe, Marginalia, p. 233 ("Bohn's Popular 
 Library"). Good examples of alliteration maybe found in 
 the work of IMasefield, Yeats, De la Mare, and Ruskin. 
 The latter will also give instances of vowel-repetition and 
 consonance. Consonance is clearly explained in Frederic 
 
 52
 
 CHANGE AND RECURRENCE 
 
 Harrison's Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and other Literary 
 Estimates. Examples of this device are to be found in the 
 works of Burke, Ruskin, Milton, and Coleridge. For the 
 effective repetition of a word see Lear's ' never ' (Act V, 
 Scene HI), and for repetition of phrase see Spenser's Faerie 
 Qiteene (I, Canto VHI, v. 32-34). Instances of the use of the 
 refrain occur throughout the Book of Psalms [e.g., Ixxx, 
 cxxxvi). These are set out most effectively in Moulton's 
 Modern Reader's Bible. 
 
 EXERCISES 
 
 1. Comment upon the presence or absence of end-rime in the 
 following : Paradise Lost, Thyrsis, The Merchant of Venice, The 
 Dunciad, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Collins's Ode to Evening. 
 In cases where end-rime is not employed, see if you can discover 
 any other forms of recurrence that may be used in its place. 
 
 2. Write critical notes upon the rimes in the passages quoted : 
 
 (a) There are who lord it o'er their fellow men 
 With most prevailing tinsel : who unpen 
 Their baaing vanities, to browse away 
 The comfortable and juicy hay 
 From human pastures. Keats 
 
 {b) It's a question with me if you ever survey'd a 
 
 More stern-looking mortal than old Torquemada. 
 
 Barham 
 (c) With the noise of fountains wondrous, 
 
 And the parte of voices thund'rous. Keats 
 
 {d) Ungrateful wretch, with mimic airs grown pert. 
 She dares to steal my fav'rite lover's heart. 
 
 Pope 
 
 3. Name and comment on the various forms of recurrence in 
 the following passages : 
 
 (a) For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept ; line 
 upon line, line upon line ; here a little, there a little. 
 
 Isaiah xxviii, 10 
 
 (b) The heavens declare the glory of God ; 
 And the firmament showeth his handy work. 
 
 Psalms xix, i 
 
 53
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 (c) The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, 
 and calculators, has succeeded ; and the glory of Europe is 
 extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall wc behold 
 that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, 
 that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart 
 which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an 
 exalted freedom. Burke 
 
 (d) The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, 
 Th' assay so hard, so sharp the conqnerynge. 
 
 Chaucer 
 
 (e) Here and there an angry spot of thunder, a grey stain of 
 storm, moving upon the burning field ; and here and there 
 a fixed wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its 
 circle of ashes ; but for the most part a great peacefulness 
 of light. RusKiN 
 
 54
 
 CHAPTER V 
 THE FIGURES OF SPEECH 
 
 I sit, and play with similes. 
 
 Wordsworth 
 
 THERE is a plain and obvious way of saying a 
 thing ; a bare, unadorned statement of fact that 
 has the merit of clearness, but otherwise has no 
 claim upon our attention. I may say, for example, 
 that " Life is short," or remark that " I have read many 
 books," but I can hardly claim that these observations 
 are original, beautiful, or startling. Indeed, they are not 
 properl}^ mine at all : they are the common property of 
 mankind. When, however, Andrew Marvell says, 
 
 At my back I always hear 
 Time's winged chariot hurrying near ; 
 And yonder all before us lie 
 Deserts of vast eternity, 
 
 and when John Keats says, 
 
 Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold. 
 And many goodly states and kingdoms seen ; 
 Round many v/estern islands have I been 
 
 Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold, 
 
 then we feel that two commonplace remarks have been 
 transformed into something beautiful, individual, and 
 immortal. 
 
 No literary artist is satisfied with bare statements of 
 fact. He does his thoughts the honour of wishing to 
 
 55
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 clothe them fittingly : he desires to please his readers by 
 presenting them with a beautiful word-picture. Far from 
 being a matter of superficial ornament, this desire arises 
 from deep feeling. To a man who has felt intensely, a 
 prosaic, matter-of-fact mode of expression is wholly 
 inadequate. As his emotion is deep, so he wishes his 
 embodiment of it to be beautiful or forcible, or both. 
 
 Now among the ways of decking out a thought that 
 have occurred to men from very early times is the device 
 of finding a likeness between the object of the thought 
 and something else. This is really another manifestation 
 of that fundamental delight in repetition that we have 
 already remarked. Like suggests like, and so, instead of 
 uttering the obvious, inexpressive, and uninteresting 
 dictum " Life is short," the poet says : 
 
 As for man his days are as grass ; 
 
 As a flower of the field, so he flourishetli. 
 For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone : 
 
 And the place thereof shall know it no more. 
 
 The truth is plain enough, but the resemblance between 
 man and grass, or man and the flowers of the field, is 
 not so clear. A man may give theoretical assent to the 
 idea that he is mortal, but the comparison between 
 himself and such things of a day as grass and flowers is, 
 when he grasps its meaning for the first time, startling 
 indeed. 
 
 The desire to present a truth in this way gives rise to 
 all the varieties of ' tropes ' or ' figures of speech ' that 
 abound in our literature, and the discovery of likenesses, 
 more or less subtle, gives us those particular figures 
 known as ' similes.' Incidentally it is interesting to note 
 that this very idea of the shortness of life, which occurs 
 56
 
 THE FIGURES OF SPEECH 
 
 sooner or later to every man upon the earth, has given 
 rise to more similes than any other. There is, for instance, 
 that tour deforce in Wisdom (v, 9-13) : 
 
 Those things all passed away as a shadow, and as a message 
 that runneth by ; as a ship that passech through the billowy 
 water, whereof, when it is gone by, there is no trace to be 
 found, neither pathway of its keel in the billows ; or as 
 when a bird llieth through the air, no token of her passage 
 is found, but the light wind, lashed with the stroke of her 
 pinions, and rent asunder with the violent rush of the 
 moving wings, is passed through, and afterwards no sign of 
 her coming is found therein ; or as when an arrow is shot 
 at a mark, the air disparted closeth up again immediately, 
 so that men know not where it passed through : so we also, 
 as soon as we were born, ceased to be. 
 
 This, and many other expressions of the extreme brevity 
 of life, we may contrast with a modern poet's embodiment 
 of the contrary thought. For Oona, in W. B. Yeats's 
 play The Countess Cathleen, life has been bitter and too 
 long, and the author makes her say : 
 
 Tell them who walk upon the floor of peace 
 That I would die and go to her I love. 
 The years like great black oxen tread the world, 
 And God the herdsman goads them on behind. 
 And I am broken b}' their passing feet. 
 
 The most effective similes, generally speaking, are 
 those where a casual glance shows no resemblance what- 
 ever, but where a closer inspection reveals that, in the 
 respect specified, the two dissimilar things are really 
 alike. For example, in Keats's lines 
 
 The clouds were pure and white as flocks new-shorn 
 And fresh from the clear brook, 
 
 the words " pure and white " provide the clue. By 
 
 57
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 their help we are able to link up clouds and new-shorn 
 flocks. So also when Mark Tapley feelingly reproached 
 the sea as being " as nonsensical a thing as any going," 
 further asserting that " like them Polar bears in the wild- 
 beast shows as is constantly a-nodding their heads from 
 side to side, it never can be quiet," we have the common 
 factor of restlessness joining two things apparently so 
 dissimilar as a stormy sea and a polar bear. It is the 
 fascination of solving a puzzle which is not too hard that 
 gives simile its charm, and the discipline of finding all 
 manner of hidden correspondences that makes it valuable. 
 A good simile takes away the reader's breath just for a 
 moment, as in the lines 
 
 I saw Eternity the otlier night. 
 
 Like a great ring of pure and endless hght ; 
 
 Vaughan 
 or here : 
 
 He mourns that day so soon has ghded by : 
 E'en hke the passage of an angel's tear 
 That falls through the clear ether silently ; 
 
 Keats 
 
 or again in this picture of a modern industrial city : 
 
 The tall stacks, 
 Like giant pencils, write 
 Broad smears across the visage of the day, 
 
 Percy Haselden 
 
 One that is so well worn, or so obvious as to have lost 
 this power of surprise, has also lost its literary value, as 
 when we say, " The brothers are as like as two peas." 
 On the other hand, the likeness must not be so subtle 
 as to hold the reader up indefinitely. A balance has to 
 be struck between the obvious and the far-fetched. A 
 simile that depends upon a correspondence of sounds 
 58
 
 THE FIGURES OF SPEECH 
 
 and not of ideas fails to strike the imagination. We have 
 an example of this in the alliterative simile that Shake- 
 speare appropriately puts into the mouth of the Second 
 Carrier in i Henry IV : 
 
 Peas and beans are as dank here as a dog. 
 
 When, however, Byron likens the sun rising on a misty 
 morning to 
 
 A drunken man's dead eye in maudlin sorrow 
 
 the comparison is more forceful than elegant. For 
 homely strength it would be difficult to surpass the 
 prophet's denunciation in 2 Kings xxi, 13, where the 
 Lord is made to say : 
 
 I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipetli a dish, wiping it, 
 and turning it upside down. 
 
 But the figure becomes even more striking when the 
 writer boldly abandons any attempt to explain himself, 
 and, full of confidence in the truth of his likeness, leaves 
 us to unravel the mystery for ourselves. Instead of 
 
 saying, " This is like that, because ," he positively 
 
 asserts, " This is that," without further explanation, 
 thus giving us a ' metaphor.' One says 
 
 As for man his days are as grass ; 
 
 As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth ; 
 
 the other declares 
 
 Man is a bubble. 
 
 The maker of this metaphor, thinking of man's frailty, 
 asks to what he shall liken him ; and, finding his answer 
 most effectively in a bubble, he boldly disregards the 
 many differences between the two, risks the possibility of 
 misconception, and proclaims that these two are one. 
 
 59
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Metaphor is as effective as it is hazardous. The writer 
 stakes everytliing upon a single throw. But the results 
 of that throw, when the hand is skilled, constitute one of 
 the chief glories of literature. One or two examples must 
 suffice here. Keats, in describing a morning scene, says 
 that the drooping leaf-buds 
 
 Had not yet lost their starry diadems 
 Caught from the early sobbing of the morn ; 
 
 and Francis Thompson, at the conclusion of The Mirage, 
 says of his poem : 
 
 This poor song that sings of thee, 
 This fragile song, is but a curled 
 
 Shell outgathered from thy sea 
 And murmurous still of its nativity ; 
 
 while John Masefield asserts grimly enough that 
 
 Life's a long headache in a noisy street. 
 
 Edgar Allan Poe, a good judge of these matters, says in 
 Marginalia that one of the most original, striking, and 
 well-sustained metaphors he could call to mind was from 
 James Puckle's Gray Cap for a Green Head : " In speaking 
 of the dead, so fold up your discourse that their virtues 
 may be outwardly shown, while their vices are wrapped 
 up in silence." 
 
 A writer will revel in these correspondences, queer or 
 homely, beautiful or incongruous, just as he takes delight 
 in finding correspondences in sound. A sonnet is in turn 
 a cell, a key, a glorious lamp, and a trumpet. The daisy 
 is a demure nun, a sprightly maiden, a Cyclops, a shield, 
 and a star. Dickens takes a particular delight in all 
 manner of Puckish comparisons. The fiddler tuned like 
 60
 
 THE FIGURES OF SPEECH 
 
 fifty stomach-aches ; the skylight at Todgers's was a sort 
 of big human cucumber-frame ; and Joe in his Sunday 
 clothes was like " a scarecrow in good circumstances." 
 In much the same spirit Lowell says in the Biglow Papers : 
 
 Th' older a Guv'ment is, the better'! suits ; 
 New ones hunt folks 's corns out like new boots : 
 Change jest for change is like those big hotels 
 Where they shift plates, an' let ye live on smells. 
 
 The effective metaphor, like the effective simile, makes 
 the reader gasp a little with surprise. When it ceases to 
 astonish, then it ceases to have life. The pages of our 
 books are strewn with these dead metaphors. As Carlyle 
 has reminded us, ' attention,' a plain, matter-of-fact 
 word now, is in reality a ' stretching-to.' Here we see 
 the primitive search for likenesses ; the analogy drawn 
 between mind and muscle, between the mental attitude 
 of alertness and the action that was often associated with 
 it. But now, to the generality of readers, the word con-' 
 veys nothing of this. As a metaphor it is dead : so with 
 ' pondering,' ' explanation,' and many another seemingly 
 commonplace word. 
 
 Not only did our ancestors search for likenesses ; they 
 also persisted in regarding everything in nature as a 
 person. Just as a child attributes feelings to its doll, 
 and prattles, without the least self-consciousness, to the 
 spoon with which it raps upon the table, so our fore- 
 fathers addressed hill and plain, the broad sea and the 
 rushing torrent, as sentient beings that could hear, under- 
 stand, and reply. What an interesting place the world 
 must have been then ! Earth, sea, and sky were peopled 
 with wonderful creatures having magical powers. A man 
 who had lost his hat in the breeze knew that Mercurv, 
 
 6i
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 the herdsman of Apollo's oxen, was playing his customary 
 pranks. The moonbeams glancing upon the waters of 
 the lake were silver arrows that Diana had taken from her 
 ivory quiver, and the slender crescent moon was her bow. 
 So the old Greeks made poetry out of the commonplace. 
 The Norseman, too, heard in the thunder not the collision 
 of blind forces, but the reverberations of Thor's mighty 
 hammer-blows. The icebergs that drifted in those 
 Northern seas were not inert masses floating hither and 
 thither at the behest of unseen and irrevocable laws : 
 they were the cows of Giant Hymir, the same terrible 
 monster who eyed the rocks so fiercely that they split 
 under his glance. 
 
 All folklore tells a similar story of the primitive instinct 
 from which has sprung the literary device known as 
 ' personification.' This, like metaphor, plays a very 
 important part in our literature. It can be really success- 
 ful, however, only when it arises quite naturally from a 
 spirit which is akin to that of those former days when 
 personification was a reality and not a pose. The Greek 
 who talked of Apollo's fiery darts was not consciously 
 expressing a pretty idea. It was that incidentally, but 
 to him it was a reality which, under the Southern sun, 
 could be painful at times. With many of our own poets, 
 on the other hand, particularly in the eighteenth century, 
 personification was an artifice and no more. They were 
 men of the world, and knew nothing of the primitive, 
 childlike spirit that could people the spaces with its own 
 creations and believe in them. The primary emotions 
 had vanished. So their attempts at personification are, 
 for the most part, flat and unconvincing ; consisting 
 chiefly in remembering to replace a small letter by a 
 capital. 
 62
 
 THE FIGURES OF SPEECH 
 Pope wrote patronizingly of the poor Indian 
 
 whose untulor'd mind 
 Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind, 
 
 and the gulf between the Indian and himself is shown 
 in the weak personifications of the following lines from 
 the Dunciad : 
 
 But held in ten-fold bonds the Muses lie, 
 
 Vv'atch'd both by Envy's and by Flatt'ry's e3'e : 
 
 There to her heart sad Tragedy addrest 
 
 The dagger wont to pierce the Tyrant's breast ; 
 
 But sober History restrain'd her rage. 
 
 And promised Vengeance on a barb'rous age. 
 
 This is merely a conventional mode of writing. We may 
 give an intellectual assent to what Pope has to tell us, 
 but we cannot persuade ourselves that we actually see 
 the flash of Envy's eye or the glint on the uplifted 
 dagger of Tragedy. These things are purely ornamental, 
 and what Lowell termed " the easy magic of a capital 
 letter " leaves the reader unmoved. 
 
 Now let us glance at some of the work of a modern 
 poet, Francis Thompson, and mark the effect of his 
 essays in personification : 
 
 As an Arab journeyeth 
 Through a sand of Ayaman, 
 Lean Thirst, lolling its cracked tongue, 
 Lagging by his side along ; 
 And a rusty-winged Death 
 Grating its low flight before. 
 Casting ribbed shadow^s o'er 
 The blank desert, blank and tan : 
 He lifts by hap towards wheix the morning's roots are 
 
 His weary stare, — 
 Sees, although they plashless mutes are. 
 
 Set in a silver air 
 
 63
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Fountains of gelid shoots are, 
 
 Making the dayhght fairest fair ; 
 
 Sees the palm and tamarind 
 Tangle the tresses of a phantom wind ; — 
 A sight like innocence when one has sinned ! 
 A green and maiden freshness smiling there, 
 
 While with unblinking glare 
 The tawny-hided desert crouches watching her. 
 
 Here is no pretty ornament, but a vision that is, to use 
 Byron's words, " horribly beautiful . . . charming the 
 eye with dread." The poet does not patronize the Arab : 
 he captures his point of view. What is more, he makes 
 us feel, just as the Arab feels, the malignant personality 
 of the Thirst that stalks so ominously by his side, and of 
 the Death that hovers over him with an ever-deepening 
 shadow. These are no abstractions touched up a little 
 for effect, and the fact that Thompson gave ' desert ' 
 a small ' d ' in the last line does not hinder that line from 
 presenting the most striking picture of all. 
 
 So in A Midsummer Night's Dream the Fairy tells 
 Robin Goodfellow of the tall cowslips that are Titania's 
 pensioners : 
 
 In their gold coats spots you sec ; 
 Those be rubies, fairy favours, 
 In those freckles live their savours : 
 I must go seek some dew-drops here. 
 And hang a pearl in every cowslip's car, 
 
 and Tennyson, looking wistfully at the dying Year, 
 says : 
 
 lie froth'd liis bumpers to the brim ; 
 A jollier year wc shall not see. 
 But Iho' his eyes are waxing dim, 
 And tho' his friends speak ill of him, 
 He was a friend to me. 
 
 64
 
 THE FIGURES OF SPEECH 
 
 Old year, you shall not die ; 
 We did so laugh and cry with you, 
 I've half a mind to die with you, 
 Old year, if you must die. 
 
 Here is the child-spirit that is essential to good personi- 
 fication. Everything around us has feeling, and this 
 feeling the child and the poet have to interpret to folk 
 of duller perception. Ruskin has said hard things about 
 the " pathetic fallacy," by which water is in some circum- 
 stances termed cruel, and in others wayward and indolent. 
 As nobody could employ this so-called pathetic fallacy 
 more effectively than Ruskin himself his strictures are 
 more surprising than convincing. Certainly the instinct 
 that led him to describe so beautifully the " stern silence " 
 of Calais church-tower was sounder than the reason that 
 led him to condemn such descriptions when used by other 
 writers. Wordsworth's statement that 
 
 The budding twigs spread out their fan, 
 To catch the breezy air ; 
 And I must think, do all I can. 
 That there was pleasure there, 
 
 is not fallacious or even merely fanciful, but eminently 
 true. 
 
 Simple personification, however, has developed in 
 several directions. That " Honesty is the best policy " 
 is a dull and lifeless statement that will interest nobody, 
 but if I personify and make a Mr Honesty resist tempta- 
 tion with happy consequences, then I stand a chance of 
 arousing some interest. I may go further and bring a 
 Mr Subtle who argues very plausibly with my Mr Honesty, 
 but is appropriately worsted at the end ; then I have a 
 ' fable,' to which my abstract statement may be appended 
 5 ^ 65
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 as a moral. I need not stop there, but may proceed to 
 show Mr Honesty surrounded by friends and foes : Mrs 
 Guile and Mr Cunning, Mr Truthful and Miss Innocence. 
 With these and others he would have dealings, and after 
 passing through all manner of vicissitudes would reach a 
 ripe and fortunate old age. This would be an ' allegory.' 
 In poetry like that of Shelley or tales like those of 
 Uncle Remus, however, we meet personification of a 
 totally different order. Take as an example the following 
 fragment from Prometheus Unbound ; 
 
 The pale stars are gone ! 
 
 For the sun, their swift shepherd. 
 
 To their folds them compelling, 
 
 In the depths of the dawn, 
 
 Hastes, in meteor eclipsing array, and they flee 
 
 Beyond his blue dwelling, 
 
 As fawns flee the leopard. 
 
 There are no veiled meanings here. The sun is a person 
 living in a world that is quite independent of human 
 needs or sanctions. The stars scatter hurriedly at his 
 approach, and sink into the obscure depths far beneath 
 the great blue dome where he reigns supreme. In this frag- 
 ment Shelley has given us a ' myth ' : a more elaborate 
 example of which may be seen in The Cloud. Dawn 
 and Cloud, it will be observed, are not personified to act 
 as foils to humanity, as, in Thompson's poem, the grisly 
 figures of Thirst and Death serve to accentuate the Arab's 
 extremity. Neither is it for the purpose of inculcating 
 moral or religious truths, as in Msop's Fables or Bunyan's 
 Pilgrim's Progress ; nor as a satire upon the follies of 
 inankind, as in Gulliver's Travels or Anatole France's 
 Penguin Island. The myth is innocent of all these 
 special purposes. It is an Aladdin's carpet transporting 
 66
 
 THE FIGURES OF SPEECH 
 
 us to a new world beyond the confines of space, or a 
 time-machine taking us back to a point before the years 
 began. It deals with a realm where human credit is 
 worthless and human scruples are unknown. And 
 Shelley stands pre-eminent among modern poets as a 
 maker of myths because, as Stopford Brooke says, he 
 " could strip himself clean of humanity . . , and move 
 among the elements like one of themselves." 
 
 " But that was cheating," objected the little boy when 
 Uncle Remus described the curious means by which 
 Brer Tarrypin had won the race. Older people have been 
 just as perturbed about the doings of the gods upon 
 Mount Olympus. But the beauty of the myth lies in 
 the fact that there are no morals save of its own creation. 
 We are given a holiday from ourselves, our customs, and 
 our laws. We enter a new and gloriously irresponsible 
 world where our little cares and preoccupations disappear 
 for the nonce, and the wildly improbable becomes the 
 commonplace. 
 
 The Western mind has never been able quite to recon- 
 cile itself to the use of figurative language, even in its 
 humbler forms. It has used it, but in a shamefaced sort 
 of way, as if to confess, " I do not, of course, really mean 
 anything so extravagant." The Eastern writer, however, 
 has flung his tropes broadcast with a reckless abandon 
 that sometimes offends and puzzles the Western reader, 
 but it gives his writing both the deUcate intricacy of 
 carved ivory and the grotesque glory of a gorgeous 
 tapestry. We have convenient examples in Fitzgerald's 
 Omar Khayyam and in the Hebrew poetry of the Bible. 
 There is, for instance, that familiar passage in Ecclesiastes 
 beginning, " Remember now thy Creator in the days of 
 thy youth," and ending : 
 
 67
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Man goeth to his long home, 
 And the mourners go about the streets : 
 
 Or ever the silver cord be loosed, 
 
 Or the golden bowl be broken. 
 
 Or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, 
 
 Or the wheel broken at the cistern. 
 Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was : 
 And the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. 
 
 Figures are not often used so freely and so naturally 
 with us, although there are some conspicuous examples 
 of a kindred richness of imagery, as, to mention but one, 
 in Francis Thompson's Essay on Shelley. But, whether 
 their use be prodigal or sparing, figures are valuable most 
 of all because they open our eyes to unsuspected glories. 
 They help us to see correspondences of which we should 
 never have dreamed, and so lead us naturally to a con- 
 ception of the unity underl3dng all outward differences. 
 " What," asked William Blake, " when the sun rises, do 
 you see ? A round disc of fire, something like a guinea ! 
 Oh, no, no. I see an innumerable company of the heavenly 
 host crying : 
 
 ' Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.' " 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE READING 
 
 A good general treatment of the subject of figures of speech 
 is given in Moulton's Modern Study of Literature and Hudson's 
 Introduction to the Study of Literature. Raymond's Poetry 
 as a Representative Art may also be consulted with advantage. 
 The personification of moral qualities in Spenser's Faerie 
 Queene and of wisdom in Proverbs and Wisdom should 
 be noted. Dickens and Kipling both excel in out-of-the- 
 way comparisons. See Mrs Meynell's essay on Dickens 
 in Hearts of Controversy for some delightful illustrations. 
 68
 
 THE FIGURES OF SPEECH 
 
 Paradise Lost should also be studied for its comparisons ; 
 note, for example, in Book I, the island (line 192) and the 
 moon (line 286). The characteristic difference between 
 Eastern and Western imagery forms one of the subjects of 
 controversy between Saladin and Sir Kenneth in The Talis- 
 man (ch. iii), and examples may be found in the poetical 
 books of the Bible or in Fitzgerald's Ruhdiydt of Omar 
 Khayyam. George Wyndham gives some illuminating com 
 ments on Shakespeare's imagery in his introduction to The 
 Poems of Shakespeare. Carlyle has d good deal to say con- 
 cerning figures of speech, particularly of metaphor in Sartor 
 Resartus (ch. xi), and of personification and allegory in 
 Heroes and Hero-worship (Lecture I). 
 
 EXERCISES 
 
 1. Comment upon the suitability of these figurative expressions 
 of great speed : 
 
 (a) There is no Secrecy comparable to Celerity ; Like the 
 Motion of a Bullet in the Ayre which flyeth so swift as it out- 
 runs the Eye. Bacon 
 
 (6) E'en like the passage of an angel's tear 
 That falls through the clear ether silently. 
 
 Keats 
 
 (c) Those things all passed by as a shadow, and as a message 
 that runneth by. Wisck in 
 
 2. IVIake a list of half a dozen striking figures of speech tliac 
 you have discovered in your own reading. 
 
 3. Compare the personification in the following passages : 
 
 (a) For Winter came : the wind was his whip : 
 
 One choppy finger was on his lip : 
 
 He had torn the cataracts from the hills 
 
 And they clanked at his girdle like manacles. 
 
 Shelley 
 (6) Melancholy lifts her head, 
 
 Morpheus rouses from his bed. 
 
 Sloth unfolds her arms and wakes. 
 
 Listening Envy drops her snakes. 
 
 Pope 
 
 69
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 4. Discuss the effectiveness of the imager}- in the following 
 extracts : 
 
 (a) The florid countenance of Mr Stry ver might be daily seen, 
 bursting out of the bed of wigs, like a great sunflower push- 
 ing its way at the sun from among a rank gardenful of flaring 
 companions. Dickens 
 
 (b) The cl3'mit seems to me jest like a teapot made o' pewter 
 Our Prudence hed, thet wouldn't pour (all she could du) 
 
 to suit her ; 
 Fust place the leaves 'ould choke the spout, so's not a drop 
 
 'ould dreen out, 
 Then Prude 'ould tip an' tip an' tip, till the hoU kit bust 
 
 clean out, 
 The kiver-hinge-pin bein' lost, tea-leaves an' tea an' kiver 
 'Ould all come down kerswosh ! ez though the dam broke in 
 
 a river. Lowell 
 
 (c) As a nail sticketh fast between the joinings of the stones, 
 so doth sin stick close between buying and selling. 
 
 Ecclesiasticus 
 {d) The skies spun like a mighty wheel ; 
 I saw the trees like drunkards reel. 
 And a slight flash sprang o'er my eyes. 
 Which saw no farther : he who dies 
 Can die no more than then I died. 
 
 Byron 
 
 5. Rossetti said that Keats's line " There is a budding 
 morrow in midnight " was the best image in English poetr)^ Do 
 you agree ? If not, what would you suggest as an alternative ? 
 
 70
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 WORDS AND LETTERS 
 
 The charm 
 Of words in tuneful order, . , . sweet 
 For their own sakes. Wordsworth 
 
 THE English language is marvellously rich in 
 apparatus for expressing fine shades of thought, 
 but this wealth for many of us serves only to make 
 the work of expression more difficult. Suppose, for 
 example, that a word is required to convey an idea of 
 the sound of the sea, not when, in compelling, majestic 
 mood, it dashes mightily against its rocky bounds with 
 a roar that makes all other sounds vain, but when, 
 placid and lulling, it creeps over the level sands with 
 a gentle insistence that can just be heard and no more. 
 There are many words that will give something of the 
 required idea. The sea may be said to whisper, to mur- 
 mur, to sob, to sigh, or to ripple. The sound steals 
 upon the listener ; it floats on the air ; it melts in the 
 ear ; it is scarcely audible ; it is low, dull, stifled, and 
 muffled ; it is gentle, soft, and faint ; its tones are liquid 
 and soothing, dulcet and melodious. We cannot rule 
 out any of these terms as wholly inadequate, yet the 
 sensitive ear remains unsatisfied without knowing exactly 
 why. Not until we turn to Shelley's Sfaiizas written in 
 Dejection do we feel that the last word has been said : 
 
 I could lie down like a tired child. 
 And weep away the life of care 
 
 71
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Which I have borne and yet must bear, 
 Till death like sleep might steal on me. 
 
 And I might feel in the warm air 
 My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea 
 Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony. 
 
 The search is ended : the inevitable word has been spoken. 
 While we grope blindly and ineffectually, the poet with 
 swift intuition seizes on the infallible expression of the 
 thought. We choose doubtfully : for him there is no 
 alternative. This is the incommunicable gift of genius. 
 The ability to write in a competent fashion, to express 
 one's ideas without breaking any of the canons of standard 
 English or offending the reader's sense of appropriateness, 
 may be learnt. It is chiefly a negative affair — the 
 avoidance of a hundred and one pitfalls. But the grand 
 positive virtue of being able with a sure touch to put 
 one's hand upon the inevitable word can never be learnt. 
 The power of appreciating it when we meet it can, how- 
 ever, be cultivated and is, in itself, no inconsiderable gain. 
 Examples are not wanting. When Shakespeare makes 
 Lorenzo describe the stars as " still quiring to the young- 
 eyed cherubins," we begin to recognize the truth of 
 Coleridge's dictum that " it would be scarcely more 
 difficult to push a stone out from the Pja-amids with the 
 bare hand, than to alter a word, or the position of a word, 
 in Milton or Shakespeare (in their most important works, 
 at least) without making the poet say something else, 
 or something worse than he does say." And this is 
 equally true of Keats when he tells of the astronomer's 
 delight " when a new planet swims into his ken," or of 
 W. E. Henley when he says " a great white moth fades 
 miserably past." Ruskin too again and again shows 
 the unerring touch of genius. Notice the force of the 
 72
 
 WORDS AND LETTERS 
 
 word ' written ' in this wonderful sentence descriptive of 
 
 the Slave Ship : 
 
 Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers 
 are cast upon the mist of night, which gathers cold and low, 
 advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as 
 it labours amidst the hghtning of the sea, its thin masts 
 written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemna- 
 tion in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and 
 mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, and, cast far along 
 the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines 
 the multitudinous sea. 
 
 No less sure is Robert Bridges, speaking of night " crowd- 
 ing up the barren fells " ; or Francis Ledwidge, picturing 
 a silent bat as it comes in the evening " dipping up the 
 gloom " ; or Hilaire Belloc, telling of the " untragic 
 sadness " which may be found " in the drooping and wide 
 eyes of extreme old age." Such words defy analysis ; 
 they take the reader most delightfully by surprise, and 
 leave him with a catch in the breath, wondering. He 
 can then appreciate Tennyson's famous line, 
 
 All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word, 
 
 Vv'hich is itself an embodiment of the virtue that the poet 
 was praising in Virgil. The beauty of the line lies in the 
 wonderful effectiveness of the word ' lonely,' coming so 
 surprisingly after such a breathless rush of syllables. 
 The reader cannot choose but pause, and so the writer 
 has made his point. 
 
 A word is often made effective by contrast. Satan, 
 endeavouring to rouse a spirit of revolt in the breast of 
 Beelzebub, says : 
 
 What though the field be lost ? 
 All is not lost — the unconquerable will, 
 And study of revengeVinimortaniate, 
 And courage never to submit or yield ; 
 
 7Z
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 and the word ' unconquerable ' gains tremendously in 
 force and significance because it comes after such a 
 succession of monosyllables. It is as if the stark hope- 
 lessness of the fallen angels' plight were itself a measure 
 of the invincibility of their will-power. So in Lines to 
 an Indian Air the word ' Champak,' which has been 
 criticized as the one blot upon an otherwise perfect poem, 
 reveals the fact that Shelley was wiser than his critics : 
 
 I arise from dreams of tliee 
 
 In the first sweet sleep of night, 
 
 When the winds are breathing low, 
 
 And the stars are shining bright : 
 
 I arise from dreams of thee. 
 
 And a spirit in my feet 
 
 Hath led me — who knows how ? 
 
 To thy chamber window, Sweet ! 
 
 The wandering airs they faint 
 On the dark, the silent stream — 
 The Champak odours fail 
 Like sweet thoughts in a dream ; 
 The nightingale's complaint. 
 It dies upon her heart ; — 
 As I must on thine. 
 Oh, beloved as thou art ! 
 
 Oh lift me from the grass ! 
 I die ! I faint ! I fail ! 
 Let thy love in kisses rain 
 On my lips and eyelids pale. 
 My clieek is cold and white, alas ! 
 My heart beats loud and fast ; — 
 Oh ! press it to thine own again. 
 Where it will break at last. 
 
 The poet's instinct told him that the languorous music of 
 the lines would be cloying and ineffective were it unre- 
 lieved, and the snapping sound of the word ' Champak ' 
 
 74
 
 WORDS AND LETTERS 
 
 gives just the necessary touch of contrast. It is, in the 
 true sense of the term, the beauty-spot of the poem. 
 
 Proper names play no mean part in producing fine 
 Hterary effects. They can, indeed, be made full of 
 significance and beauty. The extreme care which Henry 
 James exercised in the choice of names for his characters 
 has been placed on record, though the results in this 
 particular case are not, it must be confessed, alwa3^s 
 commensurate with the amount of effort put forth. 
 Still, the proper name is a factor which good writers have 
 never failed to appreciate. Thackeray's Rebecca Sharp, 
 Dr Swishtail, and Reginald Cuff will readily occur to the 
 reader as examples of the broader effects possible in this 
 direction. Dickens was an adept at this sort of thing, 
 as is seen in the Eatanswill Election, Sairey Gamp, Mr 
 Gradgrind, Dotheboys Hall, and Mark Tapley. More 
 significant still is Montague Tigg, that queer admixture 
 of gentility and shabbiness, bombast and meanness. 
 When first we make his acquaintance the shabby and 
 mean side is very much to the fore, and he is appropriately 
 named Montague Tigg : afterward, when he blossoms 
 forth as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the 
 Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance 
 Company, his creator cleverly varies his name and he 
 becomes Tigg Montague, Esq. 
 
 A name by its beauty of sound and wealth of associa- 
 tion may also lend lustre and distinction to a line. As 
 R. L. Stevenson says in Across the Plains, " None can 
 care for literature in itself who do not take a special 
 pleasure in the sound of names," and he follows \vith a 
 delightful passage into which American names are woven 
 with a charming and delicate grace, aptly pointing his 
 remarks. How much of the charm of Homer is due to 
 
 75
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 " the vo welled place-names of Grecian story " that 
 figure so prominently there ? And Virgil's shepherds — 
 Corydon, Thyrsis, Lycidas, and the rest — not onl}^ give 
 lustre to his own pages, but have formed part of the poet's 
 stock-in-trade ever since. 
 
 Sometimes we are given proper names in a long and 
 high-sounding roll. One name will call up many others 
 by association, and so we have a list — yet much more 
 than a mere list — a demonstration of what may be done 
 in the way of harmonious arrangement with even the 
 most intractable material. In describing the Doctour 
 of Phisik Chaucer gives such a bead-roll of the old 
 physicians : 
 
 Wei knew he the olde Esculapius 
 And Deyscorides, and eek Rufus, 
 Olde Ypocras, Haly and Galyen, 
 Serapion, Razis and Avycen, 
 Averrois, Damascien and Constantyn, 
 Bernard and Gatesden and Gilbertyn. 
 
 vSo formidable an array of names effectuall}^ overawes 
 the layman and prepares him to sit in all humility at the 
 feet of such a master. The device is by no means an 
 uncommon one. Spenser uses it to good purpose in the 
 Faerie Queene. In the first book, for example, he names 
 the proud and mighty Romans of old time, and in the 
 fourth he enumerates all the personages who attended 
 the wedding of Thames and Medway : 
 
 First came great Neptune, with his three-forked mace, 
 
 with Amphitrite his queen, and all the sea-gods ; then 
 followed the founders of nations, the rivers, and the sea- 
 nymphs. So through many pages the list continues, until 
 Spenser hirtiself breathlessly calls a halt and declares. 
 
 My Muse herself now tired has. 
 76
 
 WORDS AND LETTERS 
 
 And again he cries despairingly as he takes up the story 
 in the next canto : 
 
 O ! what an endless work have I in hand. 
 
 The reader who allows himself to skip these pages as 
 unimportant and uninteresting assuredly misses much 
 in all the pomp and circumstance of such a mighty 
 muster-roll. 
 
 Other examples of a more modest kind may be found in 
 that passage in the eighteenth book of the Iliad where 
 Homer recounts the names of " the bright Nereides," and 
 in a similar passage in Robert Bridges' Eros and Psyche 
 (March, Stanzas 27-28). Should the reader imagine 
 that such a roll is a purely mechanical affair and not 
 true poetry, he might try his hand at rearranging one 
 of these lists. 
 
 Proper names may be bunched in this way in order 
 to give sonority to the lines, or they may be used for 
 emphasis and illustration, as in this extract from Jeremy 
 Taylor : 
 
 A soldier must not think himself unprosperous, if he 
 be not successful as the son of Philip, or cannot grasp a 
 fortune as big as the Roman empire. Be content, that thou 
 art not lessened as was Pyrrhus ; or if thou beest, that thou 
 art not routed like Crassus : and when that comes to thee, 
 it is a great prosperity that thou art not caged and made a 
 spectacle, like Bajazet, or thy eyes were not pulled out, like 
 Zedekiah's, or that thou wert not flayed alive, like Valen- 
 tinian. If thou admirest the greatness of Xerxes, look also 
 on those that digged the mountain Atho, or whose ears and 
 noses were cut off because the Hellespont carried away 
 the bridge. 
 
 It has been said I hat " Milton can get more vibration 
 out of a word than any other poet in our language," and 
 
 77
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 certainly none of the English poets could use proper 
 names to better purpose. Here are one or two examples : 
 
 The moon, whose orb 
 Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views 
 At evening, from the top of Fesole, 
 Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands. 
 Rivers, or mountains in her spotty globe. 
 
 Others, with vast Typhoean rage more fell, 
 
 Rend up both rocks and hills, and ride the air 
 
 In whirlwind — Hell scarce holds the wild uproar — 
 
 As when Alcides, from QSchalia crowned 
 
 With conquest, felt th' envenomed robe, and tore 
 
 Through pain up by the roots Thessalian pines, 
 
 And Lichas from the top of Qita threw 
 
 Into th' Euboic sea. 
 
 As when far off at sea a fleet descried 
 
 Hangs in the clouds, by equinoctial winds 
 
 Close sailing from Bengala, or the isles 
 
 Of Ternate and Tidore, whence the merchants bring , 
 
 Their spicy drugs. ^y/ 
 
 From the sublime to the ridiculous — after 'Paradise 
 Lost, Rejected Addresses ! James and Horace Smith, the 
 joint authors of the latter collection of parodies, also 
 knew the value of proper names, as is shown in the 
 following lines : 
 
 An awful pause succeeds the stroke. 
 And o'er the ruins volumed smoke. 
 Rolling around its pitchy shroud, 
 Concealed them from the astonished crowd. 
 At length the mist awhile was cleared. 
 When lo ! amid tlie wreck uprearcd. 
 Gradual a moving head appeared, 
 
 And Eagle firemen knew 
 'Twas Joseph Muggins, name revered, 
 
 The foreman of their crew. 
 78
 
 WORDS AND LETTERS 
 
 There is something in a name, and that of Joseph Muggins 
 occurring in such a connexion is so incongruous as to 
 force a laugh. We get a similar feeling of incongruity 
 when Dickens speaks of Scrooge as making a Laocoon 
 of himself with his stockings. No parodist fails to make 
 good use of this : nicknames and irreverent clippings, 
 like ' Master Shy ' for Shylock in the Ingoldsby Legends, 
 and ' Cassy ' for Casablanca in J. C. Squire's Tricks of 
 the Trade are examples. 
 
 We have seen how proper names may be clustered 
 effectively on a page : other names may be grouped with 
 equal effect. The catalogue, usually so lifeless and un- 
 interesting an affair, becomes in a master's hand a bit of 
 fine literature. That passage from Charles Lamb's New 
 Year's Eve where he wistfully enumerates the many 
 delights that are bound up with this fleeting existence — 
 delights which he would fain take with him into the 
 hereafter — is a good example : 
 
 Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer 
 holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices 
 of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, 
 and candle-light, and fire-side conversations, and innocent 
 vanities, and jests, and irony itself — do these things go out 
 with life ? 
 
 Another, upon a larger scale, is found in Shelley's Letter 
 to Maria Gishorne, in which, though he confesses that 
 
 Upon the table 
 More knacks and quips there be than I am able 
 To catalogize in this verse of mine, 
 
 he nevertheless manages to compile a very delightful list, 
 from the pretty bowl of wood — not, as he is careful to 
 state, full of wine — to " a most inexplicable thing with 
 
 79
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 lead-in the middle." Yet another good example is 
 afforded by J. C. Squire's list in The Birds beginning 
 
 Yes, daw and owl, curlew and crested hern, 
 
 but the best of all literary catalogues, old or new, is, I am 
 inclined to think, that remarkable inventory by Rupert 
 Brooke entitled The Great Lover. 
 
 Just as it is impossible to analyse the process by 
 which genius is enabled to secure the right word, it is 
 equally impossible to divine the alchemy that can fuse 
 half a dozen words into a matchless phrase or line. As 
 Matthew Arnold pointed out, however, the presence or 
 absence of this power is not a bad test of poetry. We 
 see it in the last line of Meredith's sonnet Lucifer in 
 Starlight : 
 
 Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank. 
 The army of unalterable law. 
 
 Here the word ' unalterable ' would seem to contain the 
 secret : substitute ' inexorable,' which has pretty much 
 the same meaning and an equal number of syllables, and 
 the line is spoilt ; partly no doubt because then the stress 
 would fall upon the short vowel in ' ex ' instead of upon 
 the long vowel in ' alt.' Meredith gives us another good 
 example at the end of Modern Love : 
 
 Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, 
 To throw that faint thin line upon the shore ! 
 
 The silvery echoes of the monosyllables sound the clearer 
 lor the mighty reverberations of the preceding line. 
 
 There is a marvellously sonorous line in Milton's ode 
 On the Morning of Christ's Nativity : 
 
 While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave, 
 80
 
 WORDS AND LETTERS . 
 
 while Keats's 
 
 Charm 'd magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn 
 
 is a general favourite. Dr Hugh Walker cites this, 
 together with Coleridge's 
 
 For he on honey-dew hath fed, 
 And drunk the milk of Paradise, 
 
 and Swinburne's (from Tristram of Lyonesse) 
 
 And over them, while death and life shall be, 
 The light and sound and darkness of the sea. 
 
 Lord Morley, in his Life of Gladstone, recounts a de- 
 lightful chat with the veteran statesman upon this subject, 
 when he gave as his choice Wordsworth's 
 
 Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 
 
 Lord Morley's own preference, as Sir Edward Cook in 
 an interesting chapter tells us, is for Shakespeare's line 
 
 After life's fitful fever he sleeps well, 
 
 which is, he avers, " the most melting and melodious 
 single verse in all the exercises of our English tongue." 
 Tennyson, who certainly has some claims to be heard 
 upon the subject, chose Wordsworth's line 
 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 
 which was, he said, " almost the grandest in the English 
 language, giving the sense of the abiding in the transient." 
 But for grim strength it would be diflicult to surpass 
 that line from William Morris's Sigurd the J'olsiuig where 
 Sigurd, whose " eyes were the eyes of Odin " and whose 
 " face was the hope of the world," calls passionately to 
 Brynhild : 
 
 6 * 8i
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 And he saw the eyes of Brynhild, and turned from the word 
 
 she spake : 
 " I will not wed thee, Sigurd, nor any man alive." 
 
 It is, as Professor C. H. Herford says, " a great line, 
 terrible in its naked simplicity, preluding the ruin which 
 she is about to bring upon them both," but to appreciate 
 its force it is necessary to read the whole story as Morris 
 relates it. 
 
 It would be ungracious after considering such instances 
 to dwell overmuch upon the other side of the question, 
 yet it is instructive to note examples of ' flat lines,' 
 where the writers have, for some reason or other, sunk 
 into the lowest depths of bathos. Critics have often 
 made merry at Wordsworth's expense, and his 
 
 Jones ! as from Calais southward you and I, 
 
 and that other line of his, 
 
 A Mister Wilkinson, a clergyman, 
 
 have become classical examples of the bathetic. But 
 Wordsworth, dull though he was at times, has been given 
 an unfair prominence in this matter, and many another 
 could run him close. When, for example, Milton makes 
 the Son of God say to the Tempter, 
 
 I never liked thy talk, thy offers less, 
 
 we feel that he has fallen sadly from the epic heights. 
 The palm, however, is surely due to Coventry Patmore, 
 who endeavours to move us to rapture with a description 
 of the three-days wife at the seaside being fitted with a 
 pair of sand-shoes. This process completed, she turns 
 to her husband, saying : 
 
 I 'm ready, Felix ; will you pay ? 
 82
 
 WORDS AND LETTERS 
 
 No better illustration could be found of Sir Arthur 
 Quiller-Couch's assertion that " the capital difficulty of 
 verse consists in saying ordinary things." 
 
 This does not apply, of course, to a line which is made 
 harsh and discordant of set purpose. The same poet 
 who composed the exquisite verbal melody of the lines 
 
 A savage place ! as holy and enchanted 
 
 As e'er beneath a wanmg moon was haunted 
 
 By woman wailing for her demon-lover ! 
 
 could write 
 
 Perhaps it is the ov/let's scritch : 
 For what can ail the mastiff bitch ? 
 
 and in both cases accomplished his purpose with masterly 
 technique. If there be any beauty in the apt fulfilment 
 of intention then we cannot deny it even to the latter 
 example, but in no way could we term it ' flat.' 
 
 In the hands of a master-craftsman the length of the 
 line may become wonderfully significant. The short line 
 in William Blake's 
 
 Pretty joy ! 
 
 Sweet joy, but two days old. 
 
 Sweet joy I call thee ; 
 
 Thou dost smile, 
 
 I sing the while ; 
 
 Sweet joy befall thee ! 
 
 gives an impression of the artlessness and simplicity of 
 early infancy. On the other hand, the long line in 
 Tennyson's 
 
 Follow Light, and do the Right — for man can half control 
 
 his doom — 
 Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb,
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 fitly enshrines a weighty thought concerning man's pur- 
 pose in this life and his destiny in the life to come. 
 Then in Shelley's 
 
 Hail to thee, blithe Spirit ! 
 
 Bird thou never wert, 
 That from Heaven, or near it, 
 Pourest thy full heart 
 In profuse strains of unpremeditated art, 
 
 the varying line-length seems to suggest the rise and fall 
 in the skylark's song until a prolonged and glorious trill 
 announces that the zenith has been achieved. 
 
 Frederic Harrison has referred to the fashion for 
 extremely long lines set by Tennyson, whose fondness 
 for them became almost a disease. The first line of 
 Kapiolani has twenty-three syllables : 
 
 When from the terrors of Nature a people have fashion 'd and 
 worship a Spirit of Evil. 
 
 Such a line is cumbrous and ugl3^ The English language, 
 unlike the more liquid tongues of the South, is totally 
 unfitted to support such a burden with success. In this 
 respect, at all events, a healthy reaction has set in, and 
 the poets of to-day, reverting to Blake's practice, are 
 showing the infinite possibilities of the short line. Here, 
 as an example, are some stanzas by Mr Egbert Sandford : 
 
 God is at the Organ ! 
 I can hear 
 A mighty music 
 Echoing, far and near. 
 
 God is at the Organ ! 
 
 And its keys 
 
 Are rolling waters, storni-strcwn moorlands, 
 
 Trees. 
 
 84
 
 WORDS AND LETTERS 
 
 God is at the Organ ! 
 I can hear 
 A mighty music 
 Echoing, far and near.^ 
 
 If it is impossible to say precisely by what magic 
 process single words are fused into a matchless line, it 
 would seem almost an absurdity and an outrage to 
 analyse the word in order to show how individual letters 
 often contribute to its music and enforce its meaning 
 Nevertheless the attempt may help greatly to secure true 
 appreciation on the part of the reader ; and, as we shall 
 see, there are abundant signs to show that a knowledge 
 of letter-values is no negligible part of the writer's craft 
 
 How skilfully, for instance, the rush and swirl of the 
 mountain stream is suggested by the repetition of the sibi- 
 lants in the following lines from Scott's Lady of the Lake : 
 
 Tlie chief in silence strode before. 
 
 And reached that torrent's sounding shore, 
 
 Which, daughter of three mighty lakes, 
 
 From Vennachar in silver breaks, 
 
 Sweeps through the plain, and ceaseless mines 
 
 On Bochastle the mouldering lines. 
 
 Where Rome, the Empress of the world. 
 
 Of yore her eagle wings unfurl'd. 
 
 While in this, from Tennyson's Morte d' Arthur, we are 
 made to hear and to feel the hissing sea-breeze upon a 
 bare and lonely shore, typifying desolation, ruined hopes, 
 and a lost cause : 
 
 So saying, from the ruin'd shrine he stept 
 And in the moon athwart the place of tombs, 
 Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men. 
 Old knights, and over them the sea-wind sang 
 Shrill, chill, with ilakes of foam. 
 
 1 Brookdoivii (Macdonald). 
 
 85
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 As the roar of the torrent and the scream of the gale are 
 softened b}-' distance into a sweet lullaby, so the sound of 
 the hushed sibilants effectively conveys the idea of sleep 
 in Chapman's 
 
 Then with their nightly sacrifice each took his sev'ral tcnt^ 
 Where all receiv'd the sov 'reign gifts soft Somnus did 
 present, 
 
 and in this stanza from the Faerie Queene : 
 
 And more to lull him in his slumber soft, 
 
 A trickling stream from high rock tumbling do\vn, 
 
 And ever drizzling rain upon the loft, 
 
 Mixt with a murmuring wind, much like the sown 
 
 Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swown. 
 
 No other noise, nor people's troublous cries, 
 
 As still are wont t' annoy the walled town, 
 
 Might there be heard : but careless Quiet lies. 
 
 Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies. 
 
 Here we may notice the letter m recurring with a lulling 
 effect which even surpasses that of the s. In Tennyson's 
 lines which follow the sibilants would seem to denote 
 that delightful state, half sleeping, half waking, soon to 
 give way to the repeated in's as semi-consciousness is 
 lost in slumber : 
 
 How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream. 
 
 With half-shut eyes ever to seem 
 
 trailing to sleep in a half-dream ! 
 
 To dream and dream, like yonder amber light. 
 
 Winch will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height. 
 
 So in all lullabies s's and m's predominate. Another 
 example may be found in these well-known lines from 
 Gray's Elegy : 
 
 Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, 
 And all the air a solemn stillness holds, 
 
 86
 
 WORDS AND LETTERS 
 
 Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, 
 And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds : 
 
 Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower 
 The moping owl does to the moon complain 
 
 Of such as, wand 'ring near her secret bower, 
 Molest her ancient solitary reign. 
 
 The liquid sound of the letter / aptly expresses an}^ 
 slow and gentle movements, such as that of water in 
 W. B. Yeats's 
 
 I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore ; 
 or of falling leaves in William CoUins's 
 
 While sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves, 
 Or Winter, yelling through the troublous air. 
 
 Affrights thy shrinking train, 
 
 And rudely rends thy robes. 
 
 In the latter example we may note the transition to the 
 harsher r sound, representing the change from quiet 
 autumnal days to the boisterous winter gales that strip 
 the countryside bare. Or, again, in the last line of this 
 stanza from Gray's Elegy the repeated / sound strikes 
 a note of tender yet unavailing regret — the regret that 
 is felt as one goes forth, slowly and reluctantly, into the 
 great unknown : 
 
 For who, to dumb Forgetfulness a prey, 
 This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd, 
 
 Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day. 
 Nor cast one longing lingering look behind ? 
 
 F, on the other hand, suggests motion that is extremely 
 rapid, as in Francis Thompson's The Poppy : 
 
 Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare. 
 
 And left the flushed print in a poppy there : 
 
 87
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came, 
 
 And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame ; 
 
 or it may represent insidious feelings, like those of 
 horror and affright, which spread with lightning rapidity, 
 filling men's hearts with dismay and speechless fear : 
 
 Ev'n on Arthur fell 
 Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought. 
 For friend and foe were shadows in the mist, 
 And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew. 
 
 Any muscular effort — effort that is plainly visible to 
 all beholders — is conveyed by the repetition of the letters 
 h and p, as in 
 
 And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying 
 As if impatient to be playing 
 Upon this pipe, as low it dangled 
 Over his vesture so old-fangled, 
 and 
 
 The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh, 
 
 'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff. 
 
 The guttural sounds g, k, j, ch, on the other hand, suggest 
 effort that is not outwardly visible, or the passive re- 
 sistance of something that is hard and unyielding : 
 
 His own thought drove him like a goad. 
 Dry clash'd his harness in the icy caves 
 And barren chasms, and all to left and right 
 The bare black cliff clang'd round him, as he based 
 His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang 
 Sharp-smitten with the dint of armdd heels. 
 
 Most of these effects are exemplified in Tennyson's 
 Passing of Arthur. The description of that " last weird 
 battle in the west " that Arthur fought is a particu- 
 larly fine piece of sound-writing. Part of it has already 
 been quoted ; here are the concluding lines :
 
 WORDS AND LETTERS 
 
 And in the mist 
 Was many a noble deed, many a base, 
 And chance and craft and strength in single fights, 
 And ever and anon with host to host 
 Shocks, and the splintering spear, the hard mail hewn. 
 Shield-breakings, and the clash of brands, the crash 
 Of battleaxes on shatter'd helms, and slirieks 
 After the Christ, of those who falling down 
 Look'd up for heaven, and only saw the mist ; 
 And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights. 
 Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies, 
 Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs 
 In that close mist, and cryings for the light, 
 Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead. 
 
 The first lines here represent the full fury of the onslaught. 
 In the combination of gutturals and sibilants we are made 
 to hear the unspeakable din as spear shivers against coat 
 of mail and battle-axe crashes upon helm, while the 
 repeated aspirate tells of the laboured breathing of the 
 combatants. The guttural and aspirate sounds gradually 
 cease, and the / takes up the story, telling of a slowing 
 down of the fierce movement as, one by one, the ex- 
 hausted warriors fall to the ground. Then there comes 
 upon the battlefield an ominous stillness that can be 
 felt, and the ^'s of the last line tell of the total cessation 
 of all movement in death. 
 
 There is no denying the extreme beauty and expres- 
 siveness of such sound-effects. The possession of a 
 cultivated and attentive ear that can catch such subtle 
 and delightful music is essential to the due appreciation 
 of literature. This need not lead one to the absurdity 
 of supposing that a writer mechanically bespatters his 
 lines with s's in order to reproduce the rustle of a sum- 
 mer breeze in the trees, or with m's to suggest slumber. 
 Nobody who loves literature believes that its music is 
 
 89
 
 wo 
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 wrought after that fashion. One must see, however, that 
 the ear of a master invariably leads him to a right choice, 
 not only of words, but of letter-sounds, and that there 
 can be nothing like adequate appreciation on the part 
 of a reader who does not listen as he reads. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE READING 
 
 Ruskin's comments on a passage from Lycidas in Sesame 
 and Lilies show what significance may be drawn out of a 
 single word by careful and patient scrutiny. Notice the 
 changes that have taken place in the poet's vocabularj'. 
 With Chaucer it was perfectly natural and unaffected. With 
 the Elizabethan it was sumptuous and more self-conscious. 
 In the hands of the Augustan poet it became formal and 
 artificial. Wordsworth, in the following century, pleaded by 
 precept and example for a plain and homely diction. Since 
 then Kipling and others have not scrupled to make abundant 
 use of the vocabulary of street and barrack-room, and now 
 Mr Edmund Blunden is valiantly attempting to make us see 
 the beauty and significance of dialect. In this connexion 
 the reader will recall Tennyson's The Northern Cobbler and 
 Owd Rod. Francis Thompson will provide examples of 
 unusual words, while Masefield uses fearlessly those that are 
 ugly and discordant. G. K. Chesterton makes some interest- 
 ing comments on the subject of ugly lines in his Broivning 
 {" English Men of Letters " series), ch. vi. Further search 
 for beautiful and flat lines respectively may be left to the 
 reader ; he will find it a fascinating exercise. Milton's use 
 of proper names is made the subject of a fine passage in 
 Macaulay's essay on Milton, while Mrs Meynell comments 
 upon the proper names of Dickens's characters in Hearts of 
 Controversy, p. 47. Additional examples may be found in 
 Paradise Lost, Book XI, line 385 ; Faerie Queene, Book I, 
 90
 
 WORDS AND LETTERS 
 
 Canto V ; Book II, Canto X ; and Rossetti's The Blessed 
 Damozel. Instances of the effective use of the short Hne may 
 be found in the work of Walter De la Mare, W. H. Davies, or 
 almost any other contemporary poet. The subject of letter- 
 values receives very full treatment in Raymond's Poetry as a 
 Representative Art. 
 
 EXERCISES 
 
 I. Show how the sound echoes the sense in the following 
 passages, and point out by what particular devices the effect 
 is obtained : 
 
 (a) " And is the sea, (quoth Coridon) so fearful ? " 
 
 " Fearful much more (quoth he) than heart can fear : 
 Thousand wild beasts with deep mouths gaping direful 
 Therein still wait poor passengers to tear. 
 
 Spenser 
 
 {h) We think the eagle-winged pride 
 
 Of sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts. 
 With rival-hating envy, set on you 
 To wake our peace, which in our country's cradle 
 Draws the sweet infant breath of gentle sleep ; 
 Which so roused up with boisterous untuned drums. 
 With harsh resounding trumpets' dreadful bray. 
 And grating shock of wrathful iron arms, 
 Might from our quiet confines fright fair peace 
 And make us wade even in our kindred's blood. 
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 (c.) Let us . . . imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us 
 like an irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping 
 in the sun : here and there an angry spot of thunder, a grey 
 stain of storm, moving upon the burning field ; and here and 
 there a fixed wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by 
 its circle of ashes. Ruskin 
 
 {(i) The thunder-phrase of the Athenian, grown 
 Up out of memories of Marathon, 
 Would echo like his own sword's griding screech 
 Braying a Persian shield, — the silver speech 
 Of Sidney's self, the .starry paladin, 
 Turn intense as a trumpet sounding in 
 The knights to tilt. Browning 
 
 91
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 2. Give examples of both sonorous and discordant lines other 
 than those quoted in the text. 
 
 3. Comment upon the significance of the words italicized in 
 the following passages : 
 
 (fl) Some men with swords may reap the field, 
 And plant fresh laurels where they kill ; 
 But their strong nerves at last must yield : 
 They tame but one another still : 
 Early or late 
 They stoop to fate. 
 And must give up their murmuring breath 
 When they, pale captives, creep to death. 
 
 J. Shirley 
 (6) So like a painted battle the war stood 
 Silenced, the living quiet as the dead. 
 
 Tennyson 
 (c) " The sunshine may not cheer it, nor the dew ; 
 It cannot help itself in its decay ; 
 Stiff in its members, wither'd, changed of hue." 
 And, in my spleen I smiled that it was gray. 
 
 Wordsworth 
 
 {d) Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn 
 
 Among the river sallows. Keats 
 
 4. Point out any unusual features in the diction of tliese lines 
 and say whether you consider tliat they are justified : 
 
 (o) Amorist agonist man, that, immortally pining and striving. 
 Snatches the glory of life only from love and from war. 
 
 Watson 
 (fc) Fleet foot on the correi. 
 
 Sage counsel in cumber, 
 Red hand in the foray. 
 
 How sound is thy slumber. 
 
 Scott 
 (c) Thou rushest down in every stream 
 
 Whose passion frets my spirit's deepening gorge ; 
 Unhood'st mine eyas-heart, and fliest my dream. 
 
 Thompson 
 
 5. Invent expressive names after the manner of Dickens or 
 Thackeray for a promoter of bogus companies, a miser, a liack- 
 writer, a young man-about- town, a football enthusiast. 
 
 92
 
 E 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 PROSE AND POETRY 
 
 Poetry's unnat'ral. 
 
 Mr Weller, Senr. 
 Poetry sets the hardest lessons to music. 
 
 R. A. WiLLMOTT 
 
 ET us examine three expressions that apparently 
 embody much the same idea : 
 
 (i) All day. 
 (ii) From morn till eve. 
 
 (iii) " From the veils of the morning to where 
 the cricket sings." 
 
 For brevity and clearness the first phrase cannot be 
 surpassed. There is nothing ambiguous or undecided 
 about it. No explanation is required. For all ordinary 
 purposes it is suihcient and complete. At the same time 
 it arouses no particular emotion in the reader, but is, in 
 itself, frigid and colourless. Sometimes it is desirable 
 to sacrifice brevity and to elaborate the expression a 
 little. Then the colour is heightened, and we get a more 
 spirited phrase like the second. Nothing is added to 
 the essential thought, however, and we feel that funda- 
 mentally the two expressions are one. Just as they will 
 suit almost any occasion, so they fail to convey any 
 special thought or feeling. But when we come to the 
 third phrase we are at once in a new world, with new 
 standards of judgment. Compared with the other 
 versions this is neither brief nor clear. It gives, indeed, 
 
 93
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 no direct expression to the thought, but suggests instead 
 two pictures and leaves the reader to gather the under- 
 lying idea for himself. Such a roundabout mode of 
 expression certainly seems inconsistent with the hurly- 
 burly of affairs, where lucidity and conciseness are the 
 cardinal virtues. Evidently it is the product of an 
 entirely different attitude to life, and before we can 
 appreciate it adequately we must take pains to discover 
 what that attitude is. And though the phrase is here 
 torn from its context, we can still see something of the 
 beauty of the two pictures it presents : one of early 
 morning, when the hillsides are clothed in a thick mist 
 betokening the obscurity and wonder of a new day ; 
 the other of the cheerful hearth where the cricket's song 
 serves to " nick the glad silent moments as they pass." 
 The day's work has been accomplished, the mystery 
 unfolded, and so the curtain falls upon contentment and 
 repose. 
 
 Now there is a great gulf fixed between such expres- 
 sions as " All day " or " From morn till eve " and " From 
 the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings." 
 They are by no means equivalent phrases expressing a 
 common idea. The notion is quite erroneous that the 
 first is suitable for the ordinary workaday world when 
 time presses ; the second for occasions when a little 
 elaboration is required ; and the third for those rare 
 moments of leisure when one can afford to toy with a 
 thought and enshrine it in elegant fashion. " All day," 
 it is true, is prose — an ordinary phrase that will suit any 
 occasion when no deep feeling is experienced. When, 
 however, the poet wrote " From the veils of the morning 
 to where the cricket sings," he was giving expression to 
 the sudden and passionate yearning that comes upon the 
 
 94
 
 PROSE AND POETRY 
 
 exile in a London street as he thinks of his distant home. 
 How differently the day would be spent there ! " All 
 day " would do for the deadening routine of London 
 life, but that momentary vision of home demanded some- 
 thing very different. So the passionate longing that 
 was aroused in the poet's breast straggled to find utterance 
 in glowing words Vv^hich should convey something of its 
 depth and beauty. The fitting expression of such 
 moments of exaltation is found in poetry. 
 
 It is interesting to observe how the same facts will 
 move one man to produce clear and workmanlike prose 
 in cold blood, and in another v/ill induce that high ecstasy 
 that can only be translated into poetry. The story of 
 Cublai Can and his pleasure-house is set down plainly 
 and baldly enough by old Samuel Purchas in his Pilgrimes, 
 but Coleridge, coming upon this account long afterward, 
 dreams over it so that the bare facts are caught up and 
 transmuted into that golden fragment Kubla Khan. 
 So, when the moving story of Sir John Moore's burial 
 at Coruiia came home, Southey wrote a clear and com- 
 petent account of it for the Edinburgh Annual Register. 
 The imagination of a young Irish clergyman who heard 
 this read aloud was fired by it, and he wrote a poem that 
 has given him a sure title to fame. The difference, then, 
 does not lie in the facts or in the ideas, but in the depth 
 of feeling which those facts or ideas induce in the observer, 
 and in his ability to translate that feeling. " The wind 
 bloweth where it listeth." Southey was a poet of high 
 repute, but the story for some reason or other did not 
 move him as it moved the obscure clergyman. Con- 
 sequently those of us to-day who know anything of 
 Southcy's version know it because of its relation to Wolfe's 
 great poem, 
 
 95
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 There is no need to discuss the vexed question of 
 where the precise boundary should be fixed to separate 
 poetry from prose. There is no such sharp dividing 
 Hne : one fades imperceptibly into the other, and those 
 who have a genius for classification may work their will 
 upon all that is doubtful. Nor need we concern ourselves 
 much with the relationship between poetry and verse. 
 In the chapter on rhythm it was pointed out that when 
 the feelings are normal the ordinary prose-rhythm best 
 expresses the thoughts, and that as the feelings increase 
 in intensity so the prose becomes more and more rhetorical 
 and declamatory, with a strongly marked rhythm, until 
 a point is reached where, in order to retain coherence, 
 it is necessary to submit to the sterner discipline of verse. 
 The fact that much poetry has been written in other 
 than the recognized verse-forms does not affect the 
 general truth of the statement that verse most fitly 
 expresses great emotion, any more than the other in- 
 disputable fact that much painfully prosaic stuff has been 
 fobbed off upon the reading public in guise of verse. 
 We have the impassioned prose of De Ouincey and of 
 Ruskin to set off against many a dreary page of the verse 
 of Pope or of Cowley, yet the main truth holds good that 
 for all ordinary situations prose is the most fitting medium, 
 while the extraordinary finds its highest and most 
 memorable expression under the more rigorous discipline 
 of verse-forms. The famous passage in which Dickens 
 describes the death of Little Nell is an example of this : 
 
 She was dead. No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free 
 from trace of pain, so fair to look upon. She seemed a 
 creature fresh from the hand of Cod, and waiting for the 
 breath of life ; not one who had lived and suffered death. 
 
 This is neither good prose nor good blank verse. It 
 96
 
 PROSE AND POETRY 
 
 illustrates what Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has termed 
 the " capital difficulty " of prose. " While with verse, 
 keyed for high moments, the trouble is to manage the 
 intervals, with prose the trouble is to manage the high 
 moments." ^ Any poem of moderate length will afford 
 examples of the " capital difficulty " of verse. There 
 is an easily perceptible difference between those stirring 
 words by which Satan endeavours to rouse the other 
 fallen angels to action and the rather tedious dialogue 
 between Adam and Eve as to the best method of culti- 
 vating the Garden. On the one hand we have : 
 
 To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell : 
 Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n, 
 
 and on the other : 
 
 Till more hands 
 Aid us the work under our labour grows. 
 Luxurious by restraint : what we by day 
 Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind, 
 One night or two with wanton growth derides. 
 Tending to wild. 
 
 This does not mean, however, that the subjects of 
 poetry are necessarily abnormal or bizarre. Poetry does 
 not arise so much from the nature of the subject as from 
 the attitude of the poet. A Wordsworth could write 
 beautiful poetry about a peasant girl or a wayside flower, 
 while another man might become insufferably prosaic 
 over Niagara or Vesuvius. So also some pursue beauty 
 and enshrine it in verse that is hopelessly dull, while 
 John Masefield can boldly declare : 
 
 Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth. 
 The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth : 
 Mine be tlie dirt and the dross, the dust and the scum of the 
 earth ! 
 
 ^ On the Art of Writing. 
 
 7 97
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 As Rupert Brooke put it : "It's not only sunlight and 
 beautiful things. In a flicker of sunlight on a blank wall, 
 or a reach of muddy pavement, or smoke from an engine 
 at night, there's a sudden significance and importance 
 and inspiration that makes the breath stop with a gulp 
 of certainty and happiness." The poet, then, must have 
 what Mr Clutton-Brock aptly terms high "experiencing 
 power " : he sees more than we see, and feels more 
 deeply than we usually feel. But if poetry makes great 
 demands upon the poet, it also makes great demands 
 upon the reader. Mr Nowell Smith, in a stimulating 
 essay upon the place of literature in education,^ says 
 that his own crude attempts at writing a juvenile epic 
 led him up to Milton. Having tried his own hand, he 
 was in a position to respect the work of a master. The 
 reader should always have sufficient knowledge to enable 
 him to grasp the magnitude of the poet's task. This is 
 precisely where the ordinary reader fails. A newspaper 
 account of a football cup-tie seems to him a splendid epic 
 telling of a glorious struggle for mastery. He devours 
 it with the utmost eagerness, whereas Milton's purplcst 
 patches would bore him unspeakably. There is nothing 
 fundamentally wrong in this reader's attitude. He has 
 the necessary experiencing power, but it is woefully 
 limited in its scope. The ' highbrows ' who would affect 
 to despise his zeal are as mistaken as he is in imagining 
 that they are bookworms who know nothing of life. 
 His passion for the recital of stirring deeds is sound : it 
 merely needs to be given a wider application. 
 
 Poetry, Wordsworth said, is " emotion remembered in 
 tranquillity." The poet must have felt the deep emotion 
 that, as we have seen, is the basis of all true poetry, but 
 
 ^ Cambridge Essays on Education, ed. by A. C. Benson. 
 98
 
 PROSE AND POETRY 
 
 sufficient time must have elapsed for him coolly to 
 subject his ardour to the yoke of verse. Both tran- 
 quillity and deep feeling are necessary. Too frequently 
 the reader is biased : either he looks for pure emotion 
 and is impatient of the restrictions of verse, or he has a 
 sense of formal beauty and he cannot away with any 
 extravagance of feeling. He should be able to appreciate 
 the nice balance between form and substance, wild 
 emotion and controlling law, that makes the highest and 
 noblest poetry. 
 
 " The essence of poetry, technically," says Professor 
 Mackail, " is that it is patterned language." Pattern is, 
 indeed, a leading characteristic of all poetry. Just as 
 the decorative artist, after due consideration of the space 
 at his disposal, has to make a unit that when repeated 
 shall form a suitable and harmonious design, so the poet 
 must consider the scope of his project and then decide 
 upon the form of the ' repeat.' He has to concern himself 
 with order and relation. In both cases the key to a full 
 appreciation of the whole is found in a knowledge of the 
 pattern. Once that is mastered much may be taken for 
 granted. A plan is as essential to the poet as to the 
 designer of wall-paper or tapestry. The precise nature 
 of that plan is his own affair. He may accept one or 
 other of the traditional verse-designs that have been 
 handed down by the ' makers ' of long ago, or, greatly 
 daring, he may elect to contrive an entirely new plan for 
 himself. In the former case he will have the advantage 
 of being able to assume that his readers will comprehend 
 his pattern. There will be no need for explanatory 
 prefaces to set forth the principles governing his versi- 
 fication : there will be no room for misunderstanding. In 
 the latter case we must recognize that the poet has 
 
 99
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 voluntarily chosen the more difficult way. He has 
 decided not only to execute his task, but to fashion his 
 own tools for the work. The reader has no right to 
 condemn the WTiter on that ground alone. He must 
 take care that he is not misled by a prejudice against 
 what is unfamiliar. He should seek to fathom the new 
 plan, and so get the materials for a sound judgment. 
 It may be that the new design is no improvement upon 
 older patterns. Quite possibly the humility that does 
 not disdain to follow tradition would become the venture- 
 some poet better. The reader, however, has no right to 
 assume that. 
 
 All poetry, in any case, whether the conventional 
 iambic pentameter or the newest vers litre, must be 
 constructed upon a definite plan. The poet deliberately 
 subjects himself to the yoke of verse. If he scorns that 
 which tradition would lay upon him, then he must 
 fashion one for himself. But whatever be his choice, 
 he sacrifices his freedom in one direction that he may 
 gain more liberty in another. He cheerfully acquiesces 
 in the restrictions of a rigid frame in order that he may 
 weave a free and flowing design within its limits. Prose 
 is free and knows comparatively little of rule. Verse is 
 fixed and demands obedience to rule, but it is " an 
 obedience that makes us free." The stress laid upon 
 this aspect of verse has led many to agree with the elder 
 Mr Weller's view that " poetry's unnat'ral." As a 
 matter of fact, however, verse is one of the oldest and 
 most natural forms of expression known to man. It is, 
 as we have seen, the fittest vehicle for conveying deep 
 emotion. When, for example, Elizabeth Barrett 
 Browning, who was ordinarily so careless of the poetic 
 conventions, wished to give expression to her deepest 
 
 100
 
 PROSE AND POETRY 
 
 and most sacred feelings she chose the sonnet-form, m 
 Not only so, but her sonnets are astonishingly regular, 
 forming a marked contrast to much of her work done in 
 less exacting modes. 
 
 To sum up, though there is no rigid line to be drawn 
 between poetry and prose, we may say that poetry as a 
 rule is the expression of the emotions at their highest 
 pitch, while prose fitly expresses normal and ordinary 
 events. Consequently poetry is much older than prose. 
 When there were neither books nor newspapers, and 
 the means of expression were strictly limited, there was 
 no attempt to give permanence to any but moments of 
 ecstasy or exaltation. We have already seen how a 
 tribe would meet after an overwhelming victory or a 
 signal deliverance, and then the bard, minstrel, or ' maker 
 would be called upon to give expression to the communal 
 feeling. To him would be entrusted the task of giving 
 coherence to those unformed sensations of excitement 
 and enthusiasm that in time of stress expended them- 
 selves in unintelligible and disordered cries. As the heat 
 of the day was succeeded by the coolness of the evening, 
 so the vehement shouts of victory would be controlled 
 and shaped by the laws of verse ; and as the warriors 
 listened to the lay they would fight the battle over again 
 in a serener and more chastened mood, swaying and 
 dancing in time with the rhythm of the song. 
 
 Prose came later, when men had leisure and the means 
 to write down accounts not only of rare and outstanding 
 occasions, but also of the commonplace happenings that 
 make up the bulk of life. And with time prose has be- 
 come increasingly flexible, so that a skilful writer can 
 use it to exhibit not only the drab and the obvious, but 
 the startling and exceptional also. This he is able to do 
 
 lOI
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 by borrowing many of the devices of verse, though the 
 main form is left free. So we get the ' poetic prose ' of 
 Ruskin, De Quincey, Pater, and others. In general, 
 however, it is still true that when the emotions are 
 raised to a high pitch, their freest and fullest expression 
 is secured by submission to the rules of verse ; and the 
 higher and wilder the ecstasy, the more rigorous the 
 verse-forms tend to become. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE READING 
 
 The essential difference between prose and poetry is set 
 forth clearly in Sir Henry Newbolt's New Study of English 
 Poetry. Hudson's Introduction to the Study of Literature and 
 Moulton's Modern Study of Literature may also be read with 
 advantage. The story of how Charles Wolfe's poem came to 
 be written is told in Sir Edward Cook's More Literary Recrea- 
 tions. There are some very illuminating comments upon 
 such questions as speed and inversion scattered throughout 
 Edgar Allan Poe's Marginalia. This is appended to the 
 collection of his essays edited by Hardress 'Grady for 
 " Bohn's Popular Library." This volume also contains his 
 essay entitled The Poetic Principle. Further hints are to be 
 found in Macaulay's Essay on Milton and Emerson's " Poetry 
 and Imagination " in Letters and Social Aims. As the Bible 
 and the plays of Shakespeare contain both prose and poetry in 
 close proximity, the reader has an opportunity of observing 
 the difference in emotional effect. He may, for example, note 
 the prose breaking into verse at the end of the third scene of 
 Act III in I Henry IV. Or he may see how in Julius Ccesar, 
 where the tribunes scold the crowd, Shakespeare apportions 
 prose to the plebeians and verse to those in authority. Again, 
 in Isaiah the prose increases in emotional content until, ever 
 and anon, it achieves the regularity and self-control of verse. 
 102
 
 PROSE AND POETRY 
 
 In Moulton's Modern Reader's Bible the excellence of the 
 typographical arrangement makes the distinction perfectly 
 clear. 
 
 EXERCISES 
 
 1. Keats says, "If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves 
 to a tree, it had better not come at all." Discuss this in con- 
 nexion with the question of craftsmanship in poetry. 
 
 2. Consider the place of rules and conventions in poetry, taking 
 the following quotation as a text : 
 
 Some, free from rime or reason, rule or check. 
 Break Priscian's head and Pegasus's neck. 
 
 Pope 
 
 3. Scott makes Mr Oldbuck say, " A man may be a poet 
 without measuring spondees and dactyls like the ancients, or 
 clashing the ends of lines into rime like the moderns, as one 
 may be an architect though unable to labour like a stone- 
 mason." Add your own comments upon Mr Oldbuck's ideas 
 of versification. 
 
 4. Compare the funeral speeches delivered over Caesar's corpse 
 by Brutus and Mark Antony, and discuss the suitability of the 
 respective forms in which Shakespeare cast them. 
 
 5. Macaulay says, " He who, in an enlightened and literary 
 society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little 
 child." Discuss this with special reference to the two poets 
 Shelley and Southey. 
 
 103
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE FORMS OF VERSE 
 
 I framed to the harp 
 Many an Enghsh ditty lovely well, 
 And gave the tongue a helpful ornament. 
 
 Owen Glendower in i Henry IV 
 
 THE two main elements in verse-design are, as we 
 have seen, rhythm and repetition, and no more 
 than a passing reference to them is necessary 
 here. If, for example, from Keats's line 
 
 The owl, for all liis feathers, was a-cold 
 
 we omit the particle * a ' nothing of the meaning is sacri- 
 ficed, but all of the music. As it stands it is verse : if 
 amended in the way suggested it would be prose. Then 
 there are the various forms of repetition — head-rime 
 and end-rime, assonance and consonance, repetition of 
 word or phrase, and parallelism of form or thought — all 
 of which we may conveniently include in the term 
 ' rime.' From these two elements of rime and rhythm 
 the thread of verse is spun. The modern poet may seek 
 new modes, but he must make his verse rhythmical, 
 and he cannot escape the problem of the ' repeat.' 
 
 The thread, however, has to be woven so as to produce 
 one or other of the many verse-forms to which we have 
 grown accustomed. The architecture of verse, to change 
 the metaphor, is based upon parallelism. In Hebrew 
 verse, as we have seen, it was a parallelism of idea : in 
 English verse it is a parallelism of form. And the various 
 104
 
 THE FORMS OF VERSE 
 
 designs may be traced from the couplet, through the 
 quatrain, and on to the more elaborate stanza-forms 
 Uke those of The Faerie Queene or The Scholar Gipsy. 
 
 The parallelism of the stanza is often but a part of 
 that larger parallelism by which the stanza-form is 
 repeated so as to make the whole poem. The choice 
 of method, whatever it may be, is not haphazard. 
 Neither, on the other hand, is it merely a matter of rule. 
 Too much stress cannot be laid upon the connexion 
 between poetry and life. Life impels the poet to write, 
 and the sense of fitness that is part of his equipment as 
 a poet reveals to him the form most suited to his purpose. 
 
 A vivid thought will often flash through the mind. 
 It is intense and clamours for expression, but with most 
 of us the matter ends there. We get the thoughts, but we 
 lack the power of expression ; hence, as they came, so 
 they go. On rare occasions we may have grieved over 
 our inarticulate condition : we may have tried to remedy 
 it, but the result of attempting to frame our thought in 
 suitable words probably gave us little encouragement. 
 So now we are driven to one of two courses. Either we 
 neglect those uncomfortable thoughts that ask for what 
 we are incapable of giving, and foster only those that 
 are so commonplace as to be fitly embodied in the 
 chipped and broken language of street and market-place ; 
 or, not content with so tame an abandonment of the 
 struggle, we are driven to express our deepest feelings 
 by proxy : we resort, that is, to those who have the 
 facihty that is denied to us. It is not too much to say 
 that even in the former class there are few who, at the 
 time of some overmastering joy or deep sorrow, do not 
 feel the want of adequate expression. But only the 
 reader who is familiar with the poets can find what is 
 
 105
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 suitable just when he wants it. The man who ordinarily 
 scorns poetry finds that when he requires its solace it is 
 not forthcoming. 
 
 When a vivid thought, then, flashes through the mind 
 of a poet he is able to clothe it in words so beautiful and 
 apt that they seem inevitable. It may be that he has 
 seen a rainbow. Few of us do that without a thrill and 
 a desire to look and look as long as the magic colours 
 remain. But while we can go no further than a look and 
 an exclamation, the poet is able to say : 
 
 My heart leaps up when I behold 
 
 A rainbow in the sky : 
 So was it when my life began ; 
 So is it now I am a man ; 
 So be it when I shall grow old, 
 
 Or let me die ! 
 The Child is father of the Man ; 
 And I could wish my days to be 
 Bound each to each by natural piety. 
 
 Or it may be that he is exiled in London and, weary of 
 all its dusty turmoil, he longs for home. As he stands on 
 the hot and grimy pavement, gazing vacantly before 
 him, there comes to him a vision of the place where he 
 would be, and he exclaims : 
 
 I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, 
 
 And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made ; 
 
 Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, 
 And live alone in the bee-loud glade. 
 
 Such an expression of a fleeting thought we call a lyric. 
 As the idea which it enshrines comes unbidden upon the 
 moment, so the resultant poem is appropriately brief, 
 unstudied, and informal. There is neither argument 
 1 06
 
 THE FORMS OF VERSE 
 
 nor justification. It is but a snatch of music, careless 
 and unambitious, yet complete within its limits and truly 
 inspired. 
 
 The form of the lyric is suitably free, answering only 
 to the limits of rhythm and repetition. The poet is left 
 to write as the inspiration of the moment directs. But 
 he will, consciously or unconsciously, neglect none of 
 the devices that will make his verse musical— the use of 
 long vowels, the avoidance of harsh consonants, and the 
 contriving of a lilting rhythm. 
 
 Sometimes, however, the thought is so passionate and 
 intense as to demand a stricter form so that it may be 
 perfectly coherent. How well this is afforded by the 
 sonnet is revealed in the popularity of that verse-form. 
 With its limitation of fourteen lines, its ' turn,' and its 
 more or less rigid rime-pattern, it gives the poet who feels 
 that his idea is in danger of running away with him a 
 stable framework upon which he can execute his design 
 the more freely. The necessity of conforming with such 
 exacting requirements forces him to keep an unruly idea 
 well within bounds, and prevents him from being in- 
 coherent and ineffective. We have seen how a writer 
 ordinarily so careless of convention as Elizabeth Barrett 
 Browning was glad to use the sonnet for the expression 
 of her deepest and most sacred feelings. 
 
 There are other more elaborate verse-forms that have 
 developed from the lyric proper, such as the ballade, 
 the rondeau, the triolet, and the chant royal. The sonnet, 
 however, surpasses all these in significance and import- 
 ance. They flourished in French literature at a time 
 when a dry formalism was its main characteristic, but 
 they have never succeeded in making themselves really 
 at home on English soil. The rules of construction and 
 
 107
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 riming are so complicated that in these poems the matter 
 is of necessity made to take a second place. 
 
 But such brief, informal treatment as can be accorded 
 to an idea in any of the lyrical forms of verse may not 
 always be adequate. The writer may wish to pursue his 
 thought, just as in conversation one likes sometimes to 
 explore the avenue opened up by a chance expression. 
 There are occasions when an impromptu speech, however 
 felicitous, would be an insult : so there are times when 
 the lyric, for all its unstudied beauty, is insufftcient. It 
 is necessary to reinforce the primary idea by argument 
 and illustration ; to follow the clue that it gives to other 
 thoughts ; to select and arrange in logical order so that 
 the most forcible and effective presentation of the theme 
 may be secured. This gives us the ' ode.' Here again 
 the form of the poem is elastic. There may be a strict 
 parallelism of line and stanza, in which case we term the 
 ode regular ; or line-length and stanza-form may vary 
 at the poet's discretion, when the ode is said to be irregular. 
 Of the former we have an example in CoUins's Ode to 
 Evening, and of the latter in Dry den's Alexander's Feast. 
 Some odes, too, are based upon classical models. Thus 
 we have the Horatian Ode of Andrew Marvell, which 
 contains the famous tribute to Charles I : 
 
 He nothing common did or mean 
 Upon that memorable scene, 
 
 But with his keener eye 
 
 The axe's edge did try ; 
 
 Nor called the gods, with vulgar spite, 
 To vindicate his helpless right ; 
 
 But bowed his comely head 
 
 Down, as upon a bed. 
 
 There are also the Pindaric odes modelled upon the Greek 
 
 1 08
 
 THE FORMS OF VERSE 
 
 chorus. As the singers turned from the altar to the right 
 they sang a stanza ; then they turned again, singing an 
 answering stanza as they retraced their steps to the altar. 
 The first stanza was the strophe ; the second, contrast- 
 ing with it, the antistrophe. After that, strophe was 
 followed by antistrophe in regular succession until the 
 end, when a stand was made at the altar and the con- 
 clusion of the whole matter stated in the epode. This 
 structure may be seen clearly in the " Choric Song " of 
 Tennyson's Lotos-Eaters. Each strophe tells of the 
 languorous beauty of the island of the Lotos-Eaters ; 
 each antistrophe of the weariness of life on the waves, 
 or the harassing uncertainty of the future ; while the 
 epode conveys the final resolve of the mariners to wander 
 no more. 
 
 But, whatever may be its plan, a good ode will contain 
 closely reasoned matter arranged in logical order ; the 
 writer will make use of antithesis, exclamation, and all 
 the other devices beloved of the orator ; and the whole 
 poem will have an exalted and dignified atmosphere, 
 making it contrast sharply with the lyric proper. 
 
 Another expansion of the lyric is the elegy. Concern- 
 ing this we need only remark that is a poem of mourning, 
 and that the less poignant and more distant the grief, 
 the longer the poem tends to become. When the sense 
 of loss is very near and real, it is no time for the 
 composition of a long and elaborate poem. Lear's wild 
 and passionate cry. 
 
 Look on her, look, her Hps, 
 Look there, look there ! 
 
 more truly expresses the feelings at such a time than any 
 elegy, however beautiful, could do. When with the lapse 
 of time the sorrow loses some of its keenness and can be 
 
 109
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 " remembered in tranquillity " as an " old, unhappy, 
 far-off thing," or when it is a general sense of pathetic 
 mystery such as will come to one in passing through a 
 churchyard, then a gentler and more polished expression 
 of grief is suitable, as we are given in Gray's Elegy. 
 
 All the verse-forms that have been noticed so far may 
 be regarded as developments of the simple lyric. They, 
 like the lyric, are the expression of the poet's personal 
 feelings, but they are of interest to us all because those 
 very feelings of intense joy, bitter sorrow, deep passion, 
 and tender regret that clamour loudest for expression 
 are common to humanity and knit us all together. So 
 that the poet in speaking for himself lends tongues to 
 us all. There is, however, a great class of impersonal 
 poetry where the poet sets out to relate an incident or 
 describe a scene, and is not primarily concerned with his 
 own feelings. The first and oldest of the verse-forms to 
 be included under this heading is the ballad, which stands 
 in much the same relation to the objective poetry of which 
 we are now speaking as the lyric does to subjective or 
 personal poetry. The ballad is a simple, artless tale of 
 daring exploits and marvellous escapes. It gives a whiff 
 of the open air, and tells of a time when life was rude and 
 unrestrained. We cross the foam with Sir Patrick Spens, 
 or listen to the clash of arms between Douglas and Percy, 
 or live awhile in Sherwood Forest with Robin Hood and 
 his merry men. A doughty deed never failed to command 
 admiration, whether done by friend or foe, and conven- 
 tion counted for very little then. This is reflected in 
 the artlessness and spontaneity of the true ballad, which 
 few modern imitations can achieve. We cannot help 
 noting the contrast, for instance, between that famous 
 outlaw Robin, who 
 no
 
 THE FORMS OF VERSE 
 
 took the king's horse. 
 
 Hastily in that stead, 
 And said, " Sir Abbot, by your leave, 
 
 A while ye must abide ; 
 We be yeomen of this forest. 
 
 Under the greenwood tree. 
 We live by our king's deer. 
 
 Other shift have not we ; 
 And ye have churches and rents both. 
 
 And gold full great plenty ; 
 Give us some of your spending, 
 
 For saint Charity," 
 
 and the outlaw of Sir Walter Scott's ballad who said : 
 
 " Maiden ! a nameless life I lead, 
 
 A nameless death I'll die ; 
 The fiend, whose lantern lights the mead, 
 
 Were better mate than I ! 
 And when I'm with my comrades met 
 
 Beneath the greenwood bough. 
 What once we were we all forget. 
 
 Nor think what we are now." 
 
 There is, of course, the very obvious difference between 
 the smooth and perfectly regular rhythm of Scott's 
 lines and the rugged directness and strength of the old 
 ballad. The latter has the jerkiness of water that 
 cannot come fast enough out of a bottle. The old writer 
 told his tale as a child tells it. There is the same reckless 
 abandon, indifference to rule, inconsequent mingling of 
 omissions with repetitions, and, above all, breakneck 
 speed. Apart from this, however, we cannot help feel- 
 ing that Sir Walter's was but a carpet-outlaw. He 
 showed a capacity for philosophizing and a genius for 
 introspection of which we may be sure the bold Robin 
 Hood was quite innocent. It is indeed difficult to 
 recapture the spirit of a time so different from our own, 
 
 III
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 and few literary tasks are more hazardous than that of 
 writing a true ballad in the old style. Such attempts 
 are interesting : they are seldom convincing. 
 
 The ballad has unusual interest for us, because it is 
 the primary literary form out of which all the others 
 have grown. It is, as Professor R. G. Moulton so aptly 
 terms it, " literary protoplasm," and contains in itself 
 the three elements of speech, music, and action, which, 
 isolated and developed, have produced forms so different 
 as, say, one of Blake's Songs of Innocence and a play by 
 George Bernard Shaw, It is at once easy and fascinating 
 to trace this development. In the first place, nothing 
 would be more natural than the gradual clustering of 
 tales round a hero. Robin Hood himself is a good 
 example of this. Then, as time passed and the distance 
 increased, so the hero would grow in stature until he 
 assumed the proportions first of a giant and then of a 
 god. In the beginning, no doubt, he was a jolly, com- 
 panionable fellow, a little shrewder, stronger, and more 
 dexterous than his associates. Tales of his prowess 
 and daring were told and retold, and at each telling the 
 marvel increased. Then, many years after, when the 
 hero and all who knew him had long passed out of direct 
 remembrance, and when there was therefore no check 
 upon the veracity of the tales, some one would set to 
 work to collect all these floating stories, to harmonize 
 them, and to bind them into a coherent whole. So an 
 ' epic ' would be achieved, in which the artlessness of the 
 irresponsible ballad would be exchanged for the dignity 
 of a sonorous narrative, and its informal, breathless 
 rhythm for a stately measure in keeping with the exalta- 
 tion of the subject. The scrappy nature of short, 
 disconnected stories, too, would be metamorphosed into 
 
 112
 
 THE FORMS OF VERSE 
 
 the majestic proportions befitting a great and noble 
 theme. Besides its dignity and length, there are one or 
 two other characteristics of the epic that are illuminating. 
 It invariably tells of the struggle with adverse circum- 
 stances that made so large a part of life when man was 
 fighting desperately for a mastery that we now take for 
 granted. We see this in our own great epic Beowulf. 
 The hero was engaged in a mighty struggle with the 
 terrible monster Grendel, and his yet more terrible 
 mother. The successful issue of this tremendous con- 
 flict brought with it for Beowulf a breathing-space, but 
 no finality. In his old age he had to sally forth once 
 more, this time to grapple with the dreadful fire-drake, 
 and in that, the last and greatest of his conflicts, he 
 achieved victory, but lost his life. The treasures guarded 
 so jealously by the monster were now available for the 
 use of posterity, but the hero himself was never to enjoy 
 them. It is not difficult to interpret the story, and " to 
 regard Beowulf's successive fights with the three dragons 
 as the overcoming, first, of the overwhelming danger of 
 the sea, which was beaten back by the dykes ; second, 
 the conquering of the sea itself, when men learned to sail 
 upon it ; and third, the conflict with the hostile forces 
 of nature, which are overcome at last by man's indomit- 
 able will and perseverance." ^ Whether we read it thus 
 or insist upon a more literal interpretation, it remains 
 true that the story as we have it was told at a time 
 sufficiently removed for passion to have cooled and the 
 danger, once so imminent, to seem very remote. Hence 
 the breakneck speed of the original ballad-material 
 slows down in the epic to a measure suggesting a calm 
 and dignified assurance. 
 
 ^ Professor W. J. Long, History of English Literature (Ginn). 
 
 8 113
 
 Training in literary appreciation 
 
 An old epic, too, bears evident marks to show that 
 it was originally intended for recitation and not meant 
 to be read. Just as in Wagner's music a certain phrase 
 termed the leit-motiv is used to represent a particular 
 person, place, or mood, so in these epics set phrases were 
 made to call up corresponding ideas in the minds of the 
 listeners. Each character, for example, would be fitted 
 with a stock epithet indicative of his quality, and 
 the hearer would expect the invariable association of 
 name and epithet in the same way that the pur- 
 chaser of a proprietary article to-day looks for the 
 trade-mark. 
 
 Conditions have changed : the writer has now to 
 appeal to the eye as well as to the ear, and many of the 
 accidental characteristics of the older ' epics of growth' 
 are advisedly discarded in the more modern ' literary 
 epics.' Tricks like the use of stereotyped phrases may be 
 dropped with advantage, and the modern writer shows 
 wisdom in concentrating upon the^^essential features of 
 the epic — a lofty motive and a dignified treatment. 
 Milton's poetic instinct did not lead him astray when he 
 abjured rime and adopted heroic verse for Paradise Lost. 
 What he contemptuously termed " the jingling sound 
 of like endings " would certainly fail to induce that 
 atmosphere of high seriousness essential to an epic. He 
 was equally judicious in his free treatment of the metre 
 that he chose. By skilful variation of the number of 
 stressed syllables from the normal five to four, or an 
 occasional three, and by allowing the sense frequently 
 to ' overflow ' from one line into another, he was able to 
 avoid the monotony so much to be dreaded in so long a 
 poem without any sacrifice of dignity. 
 
 But the epic was not the only development of the 
 114
 
 THE FORMS OF VERSE 
 
 ballad. As a later product we have the ' romance/ 
 telling of the chivalrous times 
 
 When every morning brought a noble chance, 
 And every chance brought out a noble knight. 
 
 These romances date for the most part from the Middle 
 Ages and are so named because they were told in one or 
 other of the Romance tongues. As stories they are 
 freer and more intimate than the epic. They are note- 
 worthy too for certain stock situations and machinery 
 common to them all. There is always the damsel in 
 distress and the knight-errant who arrives in the nick 
 of time. There is the tournament where right inevit- 
 ably triumphs, and the supernatural, representing the 
 mediaeval sense of 
 
 the burthen of the mystery 
 . . . the heavy and the weary weight 
 Of all thi^ unintelligible world, 
 
 which we still feel, though we express it differently. 
 There are mighty giants, illustrating the importance 
 attached to brute force ; malformed dwarfs, feeble in 
 body but possessing uncanny mental powers that made 
 even the giants tremble ; and wizards who are in league 
 with the mysterious powers of darkness. And, under- 
 lying all this stage machinery, there are the mediaeval 
 ideals of strength, courage, pride, and devotion. Such 
 tales as the Chanson de Roland were enormously popular 
 in France in the Middle Ages, and their popularity 
 spread to England in Anglo-Norman times. In the 
 direct line of descent from them we have Spenser's 
 Faerie Queene, Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel, and 
 Tennyson's Idylls of the King. These metrical romances 
 are simple, direct, and familiar in treatment. The poet 
 
 115
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 has a wide range in metre from which he may suitably 
 choose, and no device is out of place that will help to give 
 his verse a musical lilt. 
 
 As Professor Moulton points out, we have in the old 
 ballad three elements — speech, song, and action. The 
 speech element developed gives us the epic ; the song 
 element the lyric ; and gesture the drama, with which 
 we have now to deal. 
 
 A good story-teller would naturally endeavour to 
 throw himself into the part of the hero, and so would 
 pass by easy stages from narrator to actor. In the same 
 way the story-writer would tend to lose his detachment, 
 and to identify himself with his hero so that he appeared 
 to tell his own story. Thus a great body of dramatic 
 literature has arisen in which it is the writer's concern to 
 present one or more characters each speaking for himself. 
 All the forms that we have noticed become dramatic when 
 this self-effacement takes place on the part of the writer 
 so that the reader is left alone with the hero. The 
 ordinary l3^ric, for instance, becomes a dramatic lyric 
 when, as in Robert Browning's Boot and Saddle, the 
 Cavalier sings his rollicking song and is gone ; and the 
 ballad becomes a dramatic story in Matthew Arnold's 
 Forsaken Merman or Browning's How they Brought the 
 Good News. From these varieties, which are intended to 
 be read, we pass to the regular stage-play, which is 
 designed to be acted in a theatre, and so places the author 
 yet one more remove from the hearers. 
 
 It is noteworthy that all the old literatures show a 
 neglect of and contempt for the common people. We 
 read of gods and heroes, knights and squires ; but, with 
 a few notable exceptions, the masses are inarticulate. 
 It has been left to comparatively recent times to discover 
 ii6
 
 THE FORMS OF VERSE 
 
 the plain man and to give expression to his feelings. 
 This has opened up a vast territory and given literature 
 a new inspiration, the effect of which it is impossible to 
 estimate. We now see that in the humblest hfe there 
 is the epic struggle, the romantic adventure, and the 
 dramatic situation. The trappings so dear to the heart 
 of chivalry are after all but stage properties. There 
 is a man behind the plough as well as on the richly 
 caparisoned steed, and the general realization of this 
 truth has opened up a vast new field to the modern 
 writer. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE READING 
 
 In his masterly introduction to The Poems of Shakespeare 
 George Wyndham refers to the suggestiveness of lyrical 
 poetry. The poet crystallizes a fleeting thought or a passing 
 mood, but in such a way as to call up other thoughts and 
 moods. The particular suggests the general, and so gives 
 voice, not to an isolated moment, but to all time. The lyrics 
 of Shelley are made the subject of a delightful essay in 
 Stopford Brooke's Studies in Poetry. Watts-Dunton's Poetry 
 and the Renascence of Wonder and Newbolt's Kew Study of 
 English Poetry may be consulted for further information 
 concerning the varieties of stanza-form. Each of the main 
 literary forms is the subject of a volume to itself in Dent's 
 " Channels of English Literature " series. There are refer- 
 ences to the characteristics of ballad poetry in Lockhart's 
 Life of Scott, and in Chesterton's Broicning, p. 145. In 
 W. J. Long's History of English Literature there is an in- 
 teresting chapter on Beowulf, while that poem and the epic- 
 form generally are ably treated in The Epic by Lascelles 
 Abercrombie. 
 
 117
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 EXERCISES 
 
 1. Comment upon the appropriateness of the verse-form in 
 Paradise Lost, Shelley's A Lament, Pope's Essay on Criticism, 
 Browning's Andrea del Sarto, Hardy's Dynasts, and Tennyson's 
 Princess. 
 
 2. Wyke Bayliss says, " Whether it is Dante . . . or Dickens, 
 whether we move in a great arc with the stars or are tethered in 
 the narrowest field — the circumference of our circle will always 
 bear the same ratio to its radius." Enlarge upon this idea, 
 taking illustrations from modern literature. 
 
 3. Mention any books of verse that you consider would have 
 been better written in prose. Give reasons. 
 
 4. Show how the modern ballad differs from the old, taking 
 Sir Patrick Spens and Campbell's Lord Ullin's Daughter as 
 examples. 
 
 5. Stopford A. Brooke says, " When a lyric rises into form in a 
 great poet, it is always in fire that it rises. But the temperament 
 of the poet conditions the mode of the fire. It is for the most 
 part a short-lived fire, but it burns more quietly in some, as in 
 Wordsworth ; more hotly in others, as in Byron ; with every 
 kind of intensity in various poets. In Shelley it burns slowly for 
 a time, then flares to heaven in a rush of flame, then sinks and 
 dies as swiftly as it flamed." Illustrate this passage from your 
 own reading. 
 
 118
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 HARMONY AND PROPORTION 
 
 Fine proportion always seems to have grown up 
 naturally ; it shows none of the difficulties that have 
 been painfully overcome, none of the snares of annoyance 
 that have been skilfully avoided. R. A. M. Stevenson 
 
 NO writer can hope to achieve greatness who has 
 not a nice sense of proportion that will tell him 
 where to begin and when to stop ; where ornament 
 is beautiful and where it would be a gratuitous excres- 
 cence ; when plainness is essential to the telling delivery 
 of his message and when severity would be repellent. 
 This from the reader's point of view needs no demonstra- 
 tion, but we are apt to forget the corollary that a similar 
 discrimination is just as necessary to the reader himself. 
 If he is to exercise sound judgment he must be able to 
 adjust his standards proportionately. We do not place 
 a prize cauliflower and a rare orchid in the balances and 
 estimate their relative values according to weight, yet 
 we are not always innocent of like absurdities in literary 
 matters. Judged by weight of learning, the delicate 
 blossom of a Shakespearean sonnet or of an essay of Elia 
 would look pitifully insignificant by the side of the 
 massive solidity of the Novum Organum or the Encyclo- 
 Pcedia Britannica. Judged by breathless movement and 
 the tax imposed upon a reader's power of concentration, 
 Sir Walter Scott may have to bow to Baroness Orczy. 
 The reader has to decide, however, not whether this 
 
 119
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 book has more learning or more movement than that, 
 but whether its learning or its movement is proportionate 
 to the aim which the writer has set before him — a matter 
 which is much more difficult, and therefore is commonly 
 neglected. 
 
 Length is the first and most obvious way in which 
 proportion shows itself. A long work gives the impression 
 of strength and a weighty, dignified theme ; one that is 
 very short conveys the idea of a flying fancy captured on 
 the wing, an air}^ insubstantial thought almost too 
 delicate for utterance. vSo we may admire both Milton's 
 Paradise Lost and Shelley's Lines to an Indian Air 
 because the length of each is proportionate to the task 
 attempted by the writer. Both Mercury and Hercules 
 are beautiful, though in different ways. Nothing, 
 however, is more tedious than a long book on a slight 
 subject, and nothing is more unsatisfactory than the 
 sketchy, irresponsible treatment of a noble theme. 
 
 All that has to be said about the necessity of pro- 
 portion in the length of the whole work applies in equal 
 measure to the length of its several parts, from book, 
 chapter, or canto down to the sentence or line. A 
 prolix opening by a writer who cannot get away cleanly 
 from the mark and a hurried conclusion by one who has 
 grown weary of his task and is anxious to banish it from 
 sight are equally reprehensible. In those tiresome early 
 chapters of Waverley and the unsatisfactory denouement 
 of Woodstock we have examples. Scott will also, as 
 W. H. Hudson points out, write " pages of description 
 about an occurrence that leads nowhither, or a character 
 who forthwith drops into a second or third place." All these 
 are offences against proportion. As for sentence-length, 
 the short, chopping sentences in which Hazlitt describes 
 
 120
 
 HARMONY AND PROPORTION 
 
 the fight between Bill Neate and the Gasman, or Charles 
 Reade pictures Gerard's escape from the mill, are cer- 
 tainly proportionate to tense moments and rapid action. 
 No less congruous, however, are the long and flowing 
 periods in which George Borrow relates how he wandered 
 along highways and byways as if all time were at his 
 disposal. 
 
 But length is by no means the sole consideration. 
 Form and appropriateness of detail next claim attention. 
 We do not complain because the atmosphere of devotion 
 is wanting in a kiosk, nor do we expect to find sweet- 
 meats exposed for sale in a cathedral. In the same 
 way, grinning gargoyles on the one would offend the eye 
 just as fretwork decked out in cream and gold would 
 seem tawdry in the other. Macaulay's assertive manner 
 is in keeping with the events of the Glorious Revolution 
 no less than the quaint, whimsical touches of Lamb are 
 suited to Mrs Battle's opinions on whist. The home- 
 liness of E. V. Lucas when he expatiates on the subject 
 of wood-fires is as appropriate as the dignity of Gibbon in 
 describing the fall of the Roman Empire. When, how- 
 ever, Macaulay wastes his hammer-blows upon the 
 unfortunate Mr Robert Montgomery the want of pro- 
 portion is painfully evident. Then the minuteness of 
 detail must be considered together with the writer's aim 
 and the space at his disposal. The scene-painter's 
 technique differs from that of the painter of miniatures ; 
 so, in selecting details for a sketch or short story, an 
 author will pursue a very different method from that 
 which he would follow within the wider bounds of a full- 
 length novel. A short story is by no means a novel cut 
 down, as a glance at some of the best work of Kipling 
 and Tolstoy will show. Details have to be selected for 
 
 J2I
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 their significance. Every touch must teU. On such a 
 restricted canvas there is no room for flourishes or 
 tentative strokes. Closely connected with the selection 
 of detail is the question of accuracy. Here again we have 
 to take the main purpose into consideration. It would 
 certainly be disproportionate for a writer of fiction to 
 spend time in verifying relatively unimportant details 
 that he might have used in bringing out the main idea. 
 Shakespeare's work is full of anachronisms, but its great- 
 ness remains because it is truly proportionate. It lifts 
 us out of a world of petty and accidental details into 
 wider spaces where the only details that matter are 
 laughter and tears, the bitterness of hate and the balm 
 of kindness. We cease to care whether the Jews of 
 Venice wore a distinctive garb, or whether there were 
 clocks in Julius Caesar's time, but we do feel more power- 
 fully than ever the poignancy of the never-ending tale of 
 human wrong, and the solace and eternal freshness of 
 mirth. 
 
 Gradation too is a matter of proportion. Sometimes 
 the lights and shadows are clearly defined, so that the 
 subject stands out in bold relief. At others a softer out- 
 line, a mere suggestion, and a touch of mystery are more 
 suitable. Dante, measuring everjrthing with scrupulous 
 exactness, leaves little to the imagination. " When he 
 enters the Earthly Paradise he takes his bearings by the 
 sun, observes the direction and force of the prevailing 
 winds, and questions Matilda about grain and water- 
 supply as if he were a staff-captain finding biUets for a 
 brigade of cavalry." Macaulay in a famous passage has 
 contrasted Dante's precision with the " dim intimations " 
 of Milton, yet very different from both of these is the 
 mystery of 
 
 122
 
 HARMONY AND PROPORTION 
 
 Magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn, 
 or of 
 
 Ancestral voices prophesying war ! 
 
 Nevertheless all are, in their varying ways, beautiful, 
 because they are proportionate. 
 
 Yet another phase is found in regularity of rhythm. 
 The tribute paid to the ' faultlessness ' of Pope has 
 carried with it the implication that writers who have 
 employed a less uniform rhythm are faulty to that extent. 
 As a matter of fact, mechanical regularity may be as 
 disproportionate as the restless turbulence that can 
 brook no law. Alexander Pope is often as great an 
 offender in this respect as Walt Whitman. " There is," 
 as Byron wisely said, " no beauty without some strange- 
 ness in the proportions." And there is little to be said 
 for the prosodist who seeks to classify every beautiful 
 line and would dub ' aberrations ' all those examples that 
 will not fit in with his scheme. Such lines as 
 
 As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, 
 
 or 
 
 So all day long the noise of battle roll'd, 
 
 will not admit of the conventional scansion, it is true, but 
 they are certainly not aberrations. Ruskin has praised 
 the courage of the builder of the Doges' Palace in Venice 
 in refusing to sacrifice comfort and convenience so as to 
 secure a conventionally symmetrical row of windows ; 
 and a good writer will be equally resolute in declining to 
 spoil the sense of his verse for the sake of preserving the 
 regularity of his iambics. 
 
 In no way is the artist's skill shown more clearly than 
 in his use of the materials at his disposal. The good 
 
 123
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 craftsman is as a rule careful even to niggardliness in 
 this matter. He will not pass an unnecessary line, nor 
 use a superfluous epithet. That Beethoven's melodies 
 are so simple, and that he was so economical in the use 
 of musical material, does not detract from the value of 
 his work, but rather enhances it. And the stark 
 simplicity and concentration seen in the work of Thomas 
 Hardy and in the later poems of Yeats, to mention but 
 two of the moderns, strengthen their work greatly. 
 Milton's famous " blind mouths," in Lycidas, is a good 
 example of concentration and econom}^ Meredith pro- 
 vides us with instances on every page of his poems, as 
 when he asks 
 
 Was ever such virago morn ? 
 
 Indeed, he carried concentration to the point of obscurity, 
 and so lost touch with proportion in that way. "UTien he 
 speaks of the Fates withholding " their starry more " 
 we feel that extreme parsimony in the use of words has 
 resulted in the sacrifice of lucidity. No such objection 
 can be made concerning the account of the restoration of 
 sight to the blind man at the Pool of Siloam (John ix). 
 It is an outstanding example of word-economy, yet 
 nothing could be clearer. Every word comes with 
 biting emphasis ; there is nothing superfluous. 
 
 Disproportion arising from too much recurrence and 
 not enough contrast will produce an effect of vagueness 
 and flatness. Too much change, and exaggerated con- 
 trasts, on the other hand, will result in caricature and 
 the grotesque. Both extremes are bad when they are 
 accidental, but done competently, and of set purpose, 
 they can be made most effective. We have an excellent 
 instance of intentional vagueness in Tennyson's. 
 124
 
 HARMONY AND PROPORTION 
 
 On one side lay the Ocean, and on one 
 Lay a great water, and the moon was full. 
 
 These lines tell of the passing into the unknown of a 
 valiant leader^ — the leader of a lost cause — and the 
 sorrowing knight is left to ask where and why in vain. 
 The same device is responsible for the terrible grandeur 
 of some of the strongest passages in Paradise Lost, and no 
 writer has used it with greater power than Edgar Allan 
 Poe in such a poem as The Conqueror Worm. Akin to it 
 is the reticence of true pathos. Every normal person 
 feels this in the presence of death or extreme sorrow. 
 There is no desire to go into details at such times. Words 
 fail. Much is thought, but little can be said with 
 adequacy or grace. Thus it is that the torrent of words 
 with which little Paul Dombey is ushered out of this 
 world is felt to be repellent and unconvincing, while the 
 superb reticence of the account of George Osborne's 
 death at Waterloo makes even the most hardened reader 
 gulp down a sob : 
 
 No more firing was heard at Brussels — the pursuit rolled 
 miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city ; 
 and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his 
 face, dead, with a bullet through his heart. 
 
 Dickens's gift for emphasizing salient features made 
 him, however, one of our greatest humorists. For while 
 pathos is the blotting out of all details by some over- 
 mastering loss or sorrow, humour is produced by the 
 Puckish insistence upon detail to the exclusion of all ideas 
 of normal relationship. We are so struck with a man's 
 squint that he is, for us, all squint and nothing else, or 
 the size of his nose so impresses us that we regard him not 
 as a man, but as a perambulating nose. So Mr Gradgrind 
 is square, and Mr Toots is for ever blushing and saying, 
 
 125
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 " Oh, it is of no consequence." We never see Mrs 
 Gummidge without hearing that she is a " lone lorn 
 creetur," while Mr Jarndyce is always casting appre- 
 hensive glances eastward. 
 
 Such caricature is an expression of individuality, and 
 as such is far truer than conventional portraiture in 
 which the retouching pencil has been fatally busy to the 
 destruction of all those peculiarities that mark out one 
 man from a thousand. One of the chief troubles of 
 modern life is that men are apparently so much alike 
 that we don't know a scoundrel when we see one. We 
 should have no difficulty, however, in recognizing Daniel 
 Quilp — the dwarf with a head large enough for a giant. 
 Nor should we need instructions to avoid Monsieur 
 Rigaud, whose " moustache went up under his nose, and 
 his nose came down over his moustache, in a very sinister 
 and cruel manner." With a good man like Mr Jarndyce 
 such caricature is a compliment. The peculiarity upon 
 which his creator dwells with loving insistence endears 
 him to us all. With a bad man like Mr Pecksniff it is a 
 flaming advertisement advising all and sundry of his real 
 nature. 
 
 Yet another stage is reached when a writer of nonsense 
 like Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll breaks free from all 
 conventions and makes a new world. The satirical 
 humorists, such as Aristophanes and Rabelais, Swift and 
 Dickens, keep the main proportions true for a very 
 obvious reason. A man may have ordinary eyes and 
 legs, but very large ears. It is just because his legs and 
 eyes are in the customary proportions that we are able to 
 notice the enormity of his ears. When, however, we 
 are taken to the " lands where the Jumblies live " we are 
 in a new world in which all our former standards of eyes 
 126
 
 HARMONY AND PROPORTION 
 
 and ears fail to apply. We can only place ourselves at 
 the mercy of our guide, and let him do with us what he 
 will. As G. K. Chesterton in his acute Defence of Non- 
 sense shows, a satirical humorist like Dickens caricatures 
 because there is something that he greatly hates or loves ; 
 something that he would fain wipe out of existence, or 
 something that is so dear that he cannot make enough of 
 it. But nonsense humorists like Lear and Carroll sigh for 
 another world, totally unlike this, into which they may 
 retreat at will, a Never-never Land where our tiresome 
 proportions do not hold at all. 
 
 The disproportion that is at the root of all humour^is 
 reflected in the forms which it usually takes. An 
 insignificant or commonplace object is given an imposing 
 and high-sounding name. Dickens calls a horse a " tall 
 quadruped," which, he also says, displayed " great 
 symmetry of bone." Later on the same " tall quad- 
 ruped evinced a decided inchnation to back into the 
 coffee-room window." Again, he wishes to tell us that 
 a horse, after going round and round, went back to his 
 home, but he prefers to say that the animal " exchanged 
 the rotatory motion in which he had previously indulged, 
 for a retrograde motion." In the same vein George Eliot 
 says, " You refrain from any lacteal addition, and rasp 
 your tongue with unmitigated bohea," and Gray soberly 
 asks Father Thames : 
 
 Who foremost now delight to cleave, 
 With pliant arm, thy glassy wave ? 
 
 The captive linnet which enthral ? 
 What idle progeny succeed 
 To chase the rolling circle's speed. 
 
 Or urge the flying ball ? 
 
 Repetition is another favourite device. The author 
 
 127
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 playfully isolates one particular feature and dwells upon 
 it with a persistence that has no relation to the import- 
 ance which a matter-of-fact view would give it. Here 
 again we may quote Dickens : 
 
 The pastrycook is hard at work in the funereal room in 
 Brook Street, and the very tall young men are busy looking 
 on. One of the very tall young men already smells of 
 sherry, and his eyes have a tendency to become fixed in his 
 head, and to stare at objects without seeing them. The 
 very tall young man is conscious of this failing in himself ; 
 and informs his comrade that it's his ' exciseman.' The 
 very tall young man would say excitement, but his speech 
 is hazy. 
 
 There are other types of humour based upon the 
 accidental or wilful association of dissimilar ideas, as in 
 the type of pleasantry represented by " Miss Nipper 
 shook her head and a tin-canister," and in the familiar 
 play on words known as the pun. In the latter instance 
 meaning is deliberately sacrificed to form. Two ideas 
 are confused because they happen to find expression in 
 words that are similar in sound, as when the Prince of 
 Wales met Falstaff upon the battle-field at Shrewsbury : 
 
 Prince. I prithee, lend me thy sword. 
 
 Fal. Nay, before (iod, Hal, if Percy be alive, thou get- 
 test not my sword ; but take my pistol, if thou wilt. 
 
 Prince. Give it me. What ! is it in the case ? 
 
 Fal. Ay, Hal ; 'tis hot, 'tis hot : there's that will sack 
 a city. \^The Prince draws out a bottle of sack. 
 
 Prince. What ! is 't a time to jest and dally now ? 
 
 [Throws it at him and exit. 
 
 " O dear discretion, how his words are suited ! " exclaims 
 Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice, out of patience with 
 Launcelot's exhibition of verbal gymnastics. He con- 
 tinues ; 
 128
 
 HARMONY AND PROPORTION 
 
 The fool hath planted in his memory 
 An army of good words ; and I do know 
 A many fools, that stand in better place, 
 Garnish'd like him, that for a trick33/ \vord 
 Defy the matter. 
 
 Lorenzo could rhapsodize in the moonhght, but when it 
 was a prosaic affair hke preparing for dinner he pre- 
 ferred a man that could " speak plain and to the purpose." 
 In the broader and more obvious types of humour, such 
 as these we have been considering, the disproportion is 
 plain enough, but in the subtler and more delicate forms 
 it is artfully veiled and will not reveal itself to all comers. 
 It is always there, nevertheless, and its subtlety and 
 unexpectedness add to its charm. 
 
 It is, as we have seen, the root paradox of literature, 
 and, indeed, of all art whatsoever, that in order to secure 
 the unity which is essential there must be contrast. 
 Extremes apparently irreconcilable must be harmonized,, 
 and in this harmony lies what is at once the prime glory 
 and the main difficulty of literary and artistic effort. 
 The flat and monotonous reiteration of a theme can give 
 neither light nor inspiration. We are stunned by too 
 much emphasis ; we fail to catch tones that are too 
 subdued. But when a few strident notes succeed a soft 
 passage, or a hush follows a fanfare of trumpets, then 
 the contrast seems deeply significant and we listen. So 
 we learn that everything is relative. We have no 
 absolute ideas. There would be no noise were there no 
 quiet. Night follows day and is essential to it. Vice 
 is never so evil as when placed by the side of virtue. 
 So change is the light by which we behold that which is 
 stationary. The oncoming night not only gives us 
 knowledge of itself, but brings also a revelation of day. 
 9 129
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 In the same way it is not until one is safely in harbour 
 that the full fury of the storm is realized. 
 
 But changes and contrasts must be harmonious ; they 
 must enhance unity and not destroy it. Where there is 
 not this harmony there is incongruity and discord. We 
 should feel that discord were Private Mulvaney, for 
 example, to use the rich vocabulary of Sir Thomas 
 Browne, or Charles Darwin to break forth into luscious 
 Eastern imagery. Harmonious contrast creates, but 
 discordant contrast destroys. By the one our impres- 
 sions are built up and strengthened ; by the other they 
 are no sooner set up than they are knocked down again 
 like so many ninepins. The musician knows this full 
 well. That is why so many compositions are based 
 upon what has been humorously termed the ' musical 
 sandwich.' A theme is stated, to be followed by a 
 contrasting theme in another key, and then a return is 
 made to the first theme. Not until we have heard the 
 contrasting theme are we able to realize the primary one 
 completely, and not till we return to that in the third 
 part do we appreciate the contrast itself. It is this unity 
 wrought out of diversity that gives art its significance, 
 making every effort, whether it be a lyric, a symphony, 
 or a frieze, a type of that great process by which all 
 things are being ordered to one end. All the lesser 
 harmonies of fitting word and appropriate form are but 
 part of that great harmony. This has been happily 
 expressed by Sir William Watson in those familiar lines 
 from England my Mother : 
 
 Trees in their blooming, 
 Tides in their flowing, 
 Stars in their circling. 
 Tremble with song. 
 130
 
 HARMONY AND PROPORTION 
 
 God on His throne is 
 Eldest of poets : 
 Unto His measures 
 Moveth the Whole. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE READING 
 
 For the necessity of balance and proportion in prose- 
 fiction, whether short story or full-length novel, see Hudson's 
 Introduction to the Study of Literature, p. 179. Brewster 
 deals with the same point in his Writing of English, ch. iii. 
 The comparison between Milton and Dante is worked out at 
 length in Macaulay's Essay on Milton. Comments on George 
 Meredith's concentration and a useful introduction to his 
 poetry will be found in G. M. Trevelyan's The Poetry and 
 Philosophy of George Meredith. The grotesque is a con- 
 genial subject with G. K. Chesterton ; reference may be made 
 to his studies of Browning and Dickens, and also to the 
 volume of essays entitled The Defendant. Lafcadio Hearn 
 refers at some length to Foe's intentional vagueness in 
 Interpretations of Literature, vol. ii, p. 164. For the distinction 
 between caricature and exaggeration see Mrs Meynell's essay 
 on Dickens in Hearts of Controversy. As for puns and the art 
 of punning, what greater authority can be had than Charles 
 Lamb ? Examples and delightful hints on the theory of the 
 subject are plentifully besprinkled over the pages of his 
 letters. Poe makes some wise comments on Hood's puns 
 in Marginalia, clxxviii. St Paul's farewell to the Ephesians 
 (Acts XX, 36), Christ's apostrophe to Jerusalem (Matt, xxiii, 
 37), and the death of Lazarus (John xi, 35) may be cited as 
 examples of the reticence of true pathos. 
 
 EXERCISES 
 
 I. Say whether you consider the length of the following books 
 to be proportionate, and give reasons for the differences :
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 (a) Carlyle's Life of Sterling and Frederick the Great, 
 {b) Gibbon's Autobiography and Decline and Fall. 
 
 (c) Milton's Paradise Lost and sonnet On his Blindness. 
 
 [d) Macaulay's Essay on Milton and History of England. 
 
 2. Give three examples of books with tedious openings, and 
 offer suggestions for their improvement. Do the same for three 
 books with huddled or otherwise unsatisfactory conclusions. 
 
 3. Justify the variation in sentence-length in these passages 
 from The Cloistey and the Hearth : 
 
 It was past the middle of the fifteenth century ; Louis XI 
 was sovereign of France ; Edward IV was wrongful king of 
 England ; and Philip ' the Good,' having by force and cunning 
 dispossessed his cousin Jacqueline, and broken her heart, reigned 
 undisturbed this many years in Holland, where our tale begins. 
 
 Gerard hung in mid-air. He clenched his teeth, and nipped 
 the rope tight with his feet and gripped with his hands, and went 
 down slowly hand below hand. He passed by one huge rough 
 stone after another. He saw there was green moss on one. He 
 looked up and he looked down. The moon shone into his prison 
 window : it seemed very near. The fluttering figures below 
 seemed an awful distance. It made him dizzy to look down : 
 so he fixed his eyes steadily on the wall close to him, and went 
 slowly down, down, down. 
 
 4. Comment on the amount of detail used in portraying the 
 following characters, saying whether you think it proportionate 
 in each case to the author's purpose : Bassanio and Gratiano ; 
 Cassius and Decius Brutus ; Sam Waller and Mr Wardle's Fat 
 Boy. 
 
 5. Describe briefly the characteristic features of the humour 
 of each of the following : Mrs Malaprop, Falstaff, Mrs Poyser, 
 Sam Weller, Touchstone, Handy Andy, Tom Sawyer, and 
 J. J. Meldon. 
 
 132
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 STORY AND SETTING 
 
 For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old 
 wayside inn where, " towards the close of the year 
 17 — ," several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were 
 playing bowls. R. L. Stevenson 
 
 THE love of a good story well told is the link that 
 binds old and young, rich and poor, aboriginal 
 savage and exponent of modern culture. A tale, 
 as Sir Philip Sidney says, " holdeth children from play 
 and old men from the chimney corner." Under its spell 
 we are carried away to distant lands, or lose ourselves 
 in the morning mists of history. Certainly there is 
 nothing intrinsically wrong with the widespread passion 
 for a story, though that is often regarded as a sign of 
 decadence. While we may feel bound to register our 
 dissatisfaction with the schoolboy gloating over his 
 ' blood,' the factory-girl revelling in her cheap novelette, 
 and the lady of fashion demanding the very latest 
 fiction at the circulating library, at the same time we must 
 take care not to condemn them upon wrong grounds. 
 We cannot censure them merely because they devour 
 stories so eagerly, for the love of a story is a perfectly 
 good and natural instinct. The schoolboy craves for 
 excitement ; the factory-girl desires a means of escape 
 from mean and sordid surroundings ; and the lady of 
 fashion, devoured with ennui, wants something to 
 make the time pass more easily. Literature, however, 
 
 133
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 is not merel}^ a drug or a means of escape, and a story 
 that satisfies these requirements and no more is bad, 
 just as a popular tune that appeals only to the emotions 
 is bad. But it does not follow that all the stories and 
 tunes that happen to be popular are necessarily bad. 
 It is not so much that the readers to whom we have 
 referred are on wrong lines as that they have not gone 
 far enough. They are not bad readers because they love 
 the excitement of a complicated plot, but neither are 
 they good readers unless they enjoy much more than that. 
 And no story can claim to be good that does not give 
 them the ' much more.' All the characteristics that 
 we have been considering in previous chapters should 
 be there, and the discerning reader will not miss them. 
 Sir Walter Raleigh says that the Elizabethan audience 
 asked for bloodshed and Shakespeare gave them Hamlet, 
 and certainly all great and true stories are alike in that 
 they give the readers more than they ask. For this 
 reason we are advised to read the best of the Waverley 
 novels at least six times, so that after we have satisfied 
 our curiosit}^ concerning the course of the plot we may 
 have leisure to observe other less compelling but not 
 less important features of Scott's work. The old stories 
 that have been handed down to us from past ages have 
 survived by virtue of the ' something more ' beyond the 
 mere thrill of incident. This is equally true of the tale 
 which Jotham told the men of Shechem, of the thousand 
 and one stories with which the Caliph Haroun-al-Raschid 
 was entertained, and of the amazing repertory of Homer. 
 The telling of a story, if we may take that term in its 
 broadest sense, is implicit in all forms of art, and our 
 appreciation of any particular work of art is to be 
 measured by our understanding of the story that is there 
 
 134
 
 STORY AND SETTING 
 
 unfolded. Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, the Laoco'on, 
 a portrait by Rembrandt, and Kubla Khan all have 
 stories to tell. If through the artist's inefficiency, or, 
 as is more probable, through our own obtuseness, we 
 fail to grasp the story, then that work of art can have 
 little meaning for us. As a rule, we shelter ourselves 
 behind an alleged lack of skill in the artist, or if his 
 reputation be so firmly established that we dare not do 
 that for fear of having our own judgment called in 
 question, then we assume the understanding that we do 
 not possess and praise where others praise. In most 
 cases it would be wiser for us to practise humility and 
 humbly to confess our lack of insight. 
 
 If a story makes its appeal by sacrificing fidelity and 
 proportion, it is false and pernicious. That is not to say 
 that a romance may not be far-fetched. The writer may 
 make it as extravagant as he pleases. He says at 
 the beginning " Let it be granted," and we are then 
 prepared to grant him anything. But we in turn have a 
 right to demand that he shall not exceed the limits 
 laid down by his own postulates. He may choose 
 whatever scale suits his purpose when planning his 
 story, but having made his choice he must abide by it. 
 There is no harm in reading of a country where the 
 dukes habitually marry the dairymaids, but if an English 
 dairymaid is set for ever looking round the corner for 
 a duke to come and marry her, then bitter disappoint- 
 ment is likely to be the result. Similarly, it will not 
 do a boy any harm to read of the wonderful exploits 
 of the personage who hides his mysterious identit}^ 
 behind the numerals ' 999,' if the boy be not led to 
 think that he can with advantage emulate those exploits 
 in his own small circle. There must be some of the salt 
 
 135
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 of reality as well as the sugar of fancy and sentiment, 
 and as a set-off to the thrill of unbounded excitement 
 there must be the less demonstrative strain of considera- 
 tion for others. The story, that is to say, should give 
 some evidence of thought on the part of the writer, 
 and so appeal to the thoughtful side in the reader. The 
 emotions are not all, and the story which would have us 
 think so is fundamentally false. 
 
 Harm is also caused by the reader's claim to have 
 everything done for him. All must be explicit. He 
 resents being left either to read between the lines, or to 
 bridge gaps with the aid of his own imagination. We 
 have already emphasized the truth that the reader's part 
 is never passive. There should be that wholesome 
 reciprocity between reader and writer by which the work 
 of the one finds something like adequate interpretation 
 in the experience of the other. But this presupposes a 
 certain fitness of mind on the reader's part that is too 
 often wanting. In that is found the key to the whole 
 problem of literary appreciation. And in that also is 
 the secret of the disproportionate influence of many 
 writers whose work could by no accepted or acceptable 
 canons entitle them to such eminence. Wordsworth 
 knew the common attitude well enough, and in giving an 
 account of Simon Lee, the old huntsman, he pauses to 
 say: 
 
 My gentle Reader, I perceive 
 
 How patiently you've waited, 
 
 And now I fear that you expect 
 
 Some tale will be related ; 
 
 and then he adds : 
 
 O Reader ! had you in your mind 
 Fuch stores as silent thought can bring, 
 136
 
 STORY AND SETTING 
 
 O gentle Reader ! you would find 
 
 A tale in every thing. 
 
 What more I have to say is short, 
 
 And you must kindly take it : 
 
 It is no tale ; but, should you think, 
 
 Perhaps a tale you'll make it. 
 
 The real stor}^ is not so much within the covers of a book 
 as in the mind of the reader. In one sense the writer 
 merely provides the raw material : all depends upon the 
 correct use of it, and that rests with the reader. Cer- 
 tainly, among the best of a.11 stories are those which we 
 make for ourselves in silent thought, or construct from 
 suggestions that are thrown out to us. The tendency 
 of modern art is to leave more and yet more to be done 
 by the individual. The artist merely hints and suggests. 
 But, to return to the story as we commonl}^ understand 
 it, we see that there are in it two elements — ' plot ' and 
 ' character.' There can be no story without movement, 
 either expressed or implied ; nor can there be any without 
 the human interest that character gives. In real life 
 the difficulty is that there is neither beginning nor ending 
 to any particular event. Charles I was executed, but to 
 say that this was caused b}^ the order of the tribunal 
 over which John Bradshaw presided, and that the result 
 was the Commonwealth, is merely to play with the 
 question. Our lack of knowledge alone prescribes the 
 limits to our inquiries in either direction. Added to this 
 there is the difficulty which arises from the multitude of 
 complications and interferences. The separate strands 
 in the tangled web of human affairs are well-nigh im- 
 possible to trace. " None of us liveth to himself." It 
 is true that a partisan may pass summary judgment, 
 but one who desires to be fair and true finds it \-ery hard 
 
 137
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 to decide how much Charles influenced others, and to 
 what extent others influenced him. And the movement 
 never ceases : we ourselves are part of it. That brings 
 us to the personal factor. The observer himself has 
 predilections and prejudices from which it is hard to 
 escape, however much he may desire to do so. All kinds 
 of unconscious influences bias his judgment. It is 
 diflicult, too, for him to take long views. He himself 
 is but a creature of a day and must judge accordingly. 
 
 All this makes history and biography singularly 
 complicated and extremely fascinating, but would render 
 a story, as we understand it, impossible. Therefore the 
 writer makes a definite beginning and ending for himself. 
 He decides upon his first cause and his conclusion. Then 
 he proceeds to cut off interfering circumstances and 
 awkward complications. He simplifies the problem just 
 as lights are regulated in a painter's studio. He makes 
 himself a god, able to survey the whole problem and pass 
 judgment. It is as if he were master of all time and had 
 leisure to survey the completed work. So in fiction we 
 have movement, but it is frozen or crystallized ; or 
 perhaps we may better compare it to a gramophone 
 record that may be put on at will. Charles Lamb ex- 
 presses a feeling that comes at times to all of us when we 
 are overpowered with the endless and unceasing procession 
 of events. " He would fain," he said, " lay an ineffectual 
 finger upon the spoke of the great wheel." This desire 
 is, to some extent, satisfied in a story. The trafiic of 
 humanity is for a short time held up, and we are able to 
 take stock of it. 
 
 It is interesting to note that II. G. Wells inveighs 
 against Henry James because he " has never discovered 
 that a novel isn't a picture . . . that life isn't a studio." 
 138
 
 STORY AND SETTING 
 
 He proceeds to demonstrate that James made the mistake 
 of regarding a novel as a work of art that must be judged 
 by its oneness, whereas the novel must follow life in being 
 various and discursive. James and those like him are 
 careful to select, when they should be anxious to include. 
 The realist, on the contrar}^ flatters himself that he is 
 giving us a bit of true life in all its bewildering com- 
 plexity. He is not afraid of ragged edges, nor does he 
 mind in the least when he is accused of being inartistic. 
 He forgets, however, that he is as dependent upon selec- 
 tion as ever Henry James was. What he gives us is, 
 after all, a bit of life only, and why this particular bit more 
 than any other ? It had to begin somewhere and end 
 somewhere, whereas real life is an ever-flowing stream 
 without beginning or ending. So that the realist's choice 
 is as arbitrary and his work as artificial as that of the most 
 conscious artist. It is clear that in electing to begin at 
 a certain point he is prejudging the case. That is not 
 to say that the open-air work of a realist has not many 
 merits that are absent from the work of the artist in the 
 studio. The world of letters is wide enough for both, 
 and realism tends to become mischievous when it assumes 
 an impartiality that it certainly does not possess. 
 
 Design in a storj' is as necessary as design in verse- 
 form, and those who profess to regard fiction as a formless 
 affair, quite free from laws of any kind, have not yet 
 arrived at an understanding of the elements of the 
 problem. The story- writer has to design his movement 
 and select his events in the manner we have indicated, 
 and this design is what we commonly know as ' plot.' 
 
 The movement need not necessarily take place while we 
 watch. It may have preceded a selected moment, and 
 we are spectators of the result. When, for instance, 
 
 139
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 we see the Lotos-Eaters reclining on a flowery bank, 
 our appreciation of their present position is largely 
 conditioned by our knowledge of their recent experiences 
 on the way. Or what we see maj^ be the cause that 
 shall lead the way to untold results, as when we watch 
 Columbus placing his foot upon the shore of the New 
 World. But in any case the movement is there, actual 
 or implied. In the best Greek drama the bulk of the 
 action took place off the stage, but what was seen and 
 heard would have been impossible had there been no 
 action. 
 
 The plot has no meaning, however, apart from the 
 persons or ' characters ' whom it affects, and the first 
 lesson that we have to learn concerning character is that 
 it is never stationary. Experimental psychologists are 
 busy devising rnind-measures, but a satisfactory measure 
 of character remains to be found. We can only with 
 very partial success judge one another, while to our- 
 selves we remain insoluble mysteries. To all appearances 
 the character of the man with whom we may be con- 
 versant is as fixed as the hour-hand of the clock, which 
 gives no hint of movement as we gaze at it. Yet we know 
 that the one is developing as surely as the other is moving, 
 and it is the story-teller's business to demonstrate that 
 development clearly. He has to show how Henry Durie, 
 apparently the safest and steadiest of men, was forced by 
 the unspeakable villainy of the Master of Ballantrae to 
 stoop to the villain's level. He has to show two 
 characters like Bassanio and Portia growing and expand- 
 ing under adverse circumstances so as to command an 
 admiration that would certainl}^ never be theirs had they 
 remained as they were when first we met them. The 
 weak story-teller fails here. He gives us puppets, not 
 140
 
 STORY AND SETTING 
 
 characters. As they were in the beginning, so they are 
 to the end. There is the conventional hero with a 
 marvellous penchant for getting into scrapes ; the dis- 
 traught heroine whose tearful plight is hardly convincing ; 
 and the villain who has made villainy a hobby. At the 
 end there is still the hero, a bit of a fool who doesn't 
 deserve his luck ; the heroine smiling through her tears ; 
 and the villain, baffled, yet a villain still. Nothing has 
 essentially changed. 
 
 We may perhaps the better appreciate the part played 
 in all stories by these elements of plot and character if 
 we look at one or two plot-diagrams. In i Henry IV we 
 have the fundamental clash of characters in the contrast 
 between the two sons, Harry Percy and Harry Planta- 
 genet, which gives rise to the whole play. This contrast 
 is accentuated when Percy goes north to join Douglas 
 and plan the rebellion, while the Prince goes south to 
 join Falstaff and play at highway-robbery. The result 
 of the one is the raising of the standard of revolt : of the 
 other the Gadshill robbery. So far all proceeds according 
 to pattern, but the unexpected happens when the news 
 of Percy's rebellion reacts upon the erring Prince and, 
 at the urgent call of duty, he retraces his steps and goes 
 to Shrewsbury. Now we see the two sons together, but 
 more as two brave men fitly matched than as two con- 
 trasted characters, and Percy dies not unworthily after 
 all at the hand of Prince Harry. A secondary contrast 
 is provided by the characters of Glendower and Falstaff. 
 The utter lack of a sense of humour of the one and the 
 excessive and ill-timed sense of humour of the other 
 both serve to provide those rollicking passages that make 
 the play so delightful. Such is the movement and the 
 character that make up the story. We might regard 
 
 141
 
 PLOT-DIAGRAM OF " i HENRY IV " 
 
 Glendower's 
 lack of humour 
 
 provides 
 comic episodes 
 
 Falstaff's 
 excess of humour 
 
 provides 
 comic episodes 
 
 Standard 
 of 
 
 REBELLION 
 
 raised 
 
 O 
 
 
 Harry 
 Percy 
 
 Harry 
 Monmouth 
 
 O 
 
 Two Women : 
 
 Lady Percy and Lady 
 
 Mortimer 
 
 afford reUef from 
 
 prevaiUng atmosphere 
 
 ^ of 
 
 warfare and 
 
 tavern gossip 
 
 « 
 
 142
 
 STORY AND SETTING 
 
 Falstaff as a psychological phenomenon, and prosecute 
 elaborate inquiries into his past history so as to secure 
 a logical and comprehensive explanation of the doings 
 of this prince of humorists. Then Prince Henry's rather 
 quixotic behaviour is not adequately accounted for by 
 the likeness which he draws between himself and the sun, 
 and we might seek further for possible causes. But 
 Shakespeare encourages no such questions, and, indeed, 
 it is idle to ask them, though it may provide good fun, 
 as in the playful essay on Falstaff in Obiter Dicta. The 
 author exercised his right of selection, and he also chose 
 the scale on which the story is planned. So much being 
 granted, the whole play works itself out accordingly. 
 Once the premises are settled, the outcome is in a large 
 measure out of the writer's control. When Little Nell 
 died angry protests reached the author from all quarters, 
 but he had no option in the matter. Inexorable circum- 
 stances had sealed Little Nell's fate, and for Dickens to 
 have offered any other solution as a concession to weak 
 sentimentalism would have been an outrage to fidelity. 
 Some less judicious writers have yielded to popular 
 clamour. Favourite characters have, with no matter 
 what wrench to probability, been recalled to life, and the 
 melancholy outcome of the resurrection remains in each 
 case for a warning. 
 
 As You Like It gives us a story in which the chief 
 interest would seem to be in character and not in plot. 
 It is primarily a study in contrasts. There is the very 
 vivid contrast in setting and its inevitable reaction on 
 character. On the one hand there is the confined and 
 luxurious atmosphere of the Court, breeding jealousy 
 and discontent in evil natures, fondness and lax submis- 
 sion in those who are inclined to goodness. On the other 
 
 143
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 hand there is the free and wholesome discipline of the 
 open air, inducing reconciliation and goodwill. The 
 artificial light in the one causes distortion and a false per- 
 spective that cannot be corrected until all go out into the 
 open and view themselves and their fellows in the broad 
 light of day. This contrast, painful enough in itself, 
 is reinforced by a number of character-contrasts. There 
 are the two rulers, one easy-going, but a true philoso- 
 pher when he loses his power ; the other greedy of place, 
 but a prey to an uneasy conscience when he gets it. 
 Round these are grouped a number of contrasting pairs, 
 perhaps the most interesting being the two wits Jaques 
 and Touchstone. The one is a professed cynic, passing 
 for a wise man in the eyes of the world, but his wisdom 
 is half foUy. The other is an avowed fool to whom no 
 one is expected to pay serious heed, but his folly is half 
 wisdom. Most important of all, however, is the develop- 
 ment of character which the play shows. The easy-going 
 Duke Senior and the grasping Duke Frederick and the 
 covetous Oliver all have to pass through the stern 
 discipline of the forest. The trappings of circumstance 
 are removed and a sense of essential values is secured, 
 leading inevitably to restitution on the one hand and 
 to a firmer grasp of responsibilities on the other. 
 
 Thus we see the importance of setting, a factor that 
 no story-teller can afford to neglect. It may be sympa- 
 thetic and in unison with the main idea, as in Matthew 
 Arnold's Forsaken Merman, where, as hope gradually 
 recedes and the truth dawns upon the Merman that 
 Margaret will never return, the storm-clouds gather 
 and the sea grows stormy. In Spenser's Shepherd's 
 Calendar, too, the old man Thenot, who is scorned by 
 Cuddie, " telleth a tale of the Oak and the Brier, so 
 144
 
 PLOT-DIAGRAM OF "AS YOU LIKE IT" 
 A STUDY IN CONTRASTS 
 
 Contrast in 
 Setting 
 
 (reacting on 
 character) 
 
 Character 
 Contrasts 
 
 f Confined and luxurious atmosphere of Court , 
 
 I breeding discontent and jealousy. 
 
 I Free discipline of Open Air, 
 
 t inducing reconciliation and good^vtll. 
 
 Character 
 Development 
 
 10 
 
 f 
 
 I. Two Rulers I 
 
 2. Two Brothers 
 
 3. Two Wits 
 
 4. Two Cousins 
 
 5. Two Marriages 
 
 Duke Senior, 
 
 lax, but philosophic. 
 
 Duke Frederick, 
 
 grasping, but the prey 
 of conscience. 
 
 Oliver, 
 covetous. 
 
 Orlando, 
 
 naturally generous. 
 
 f Jaques the Cynic, 
 j his wisdom half folly. 
 
 I Touchstone the Clown, 
 (^ his folly half wisdom. 
 
 f Contrasting in 
 J Rosalind J disposition, 
 [C']:lia 1 united in 
 
 [ affection. 
 Orlando and Rosalind. 
 Touchstone and Audrey. 
 
 Laxity Greed and Envy 
 
 of of 
 
 Duke Senior. Duke Frederick and Oliver. 
 
 The Discipline of the Forest 
 
 Producing sense of true values, leading to 
 restitution and firmer grasp of responsi- 
 bilities. 
 
 145
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 lively, and so feelingly, as, if the thing were set forth in 
 some Picture before our eyes, more plainly could not 
 appear." And the tale is placed in a wintry setting, 
 Spenser explains, " for as in this time of year, so then in 
 our bodies, there is a dry and withering cold, which con- 
 gealeth the curdled blood, and freezeth the weatherbeaten 
 flesh with storms of Fortune and hoar frosts of Care." 
 In the same way Tennyson enshrouds that last battle 
 which Arthur fought, a hopeless struggle for a lost cause, 
 in the confusion of an all-enveloping mist. 
 
 But the setting may be a contrast, so as to make the 
 main theme stand out in sharp relief. Beautiful sur- 
 roundings will strangely and unreasonably induce a 
 feeling of sadness at times. Jessica, seated upon the 
 moonlit bank at Belmont with Lorenzo, says pensively : 
 
 I am never merry when I hear sweet music ; 
 
 and Shelley at Naples, when 
 
 The sun is warm, the sky is clear, 
 
 Tlie waves are dancing fast and bright. 
 
 Blue isles and snowy mountains wear 
 The purple noon's transparent might, 
 
 gives us Stanzas written in Dejection. And for setting 
 of the Ancient Mariner's tale of unredeemed solitudes 
 and the great spaces of the sea we have the contrasting 
 suggestion of the pleasant warmth and homely mirth of 
 the wedding-feast. Now and again strains reach us from 
 the merry throng, but they grow fainter and fainter, 
 until at length all interest is absorbed in the main story. 
 But the tale of that thoughtless deed and terrible expia- 
 tion would not be what it is without the wedding-feast 
 in the background. 
 146
 
 STORY AND SETTING 
 
 It is a favourite device to represent man, whose days 
 are so uncertain and full of trouble, as being set in a 
 world of nature apparently unchanging and never-ending. 
 Men desire, struggle, weep, and pray by turns, but Nature 
 looks unconcernedly on. Before they came she was there : 
 and there she will remain long after they are gone. As 
 for her other creatures, if they take notice of the feverish 
 strivings of man, it is only to mock at them. So Richard 
 Jefferies looks at the pigeons fluttering about the portico 
 of the British Museum, and then thinks of the doves that 
 haunted the temples of Greece. Empires rise and fall ; 
 systems of thought grow antiquated and are superseded ; 
 but the birds " who have not laboured nor travailed in 
 thought " ever possess the sunlight. In precisely the 
 same way Keats addresses the nightingale as " immortal 
 bird," and thinks of the long succession of all sorts and 
 conditions of men that have listened to its song. With 
 Henley it is the blackbird singing " Death is fleet, life is 
 sweet " in the may, while the lovers keep their tryst, 
 tarry a while, and then die. The blackbird also 
 enters into George Meredith's touching picture of Change 
 in Recurrence. There, too, are the squirrel and the 
 " snail-tapping thrush," but one — the one to whom all 
 these were so dear — is gone : 
 
 I gazed : 'twas the scene of the frame, 
 With the face, the dear life for me, fled. 
 
 Beginning and ending also take a special importance, 
 giving a reminder of the days when stories were actually 
 told. The narrator depended upon the opening sentences 
 to arrest the attention of his hearers, and with the last he 
 clinched the whole matter and gave the impression that 
 he wished to remain with them. In writ 'en work also 
 
 147
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 the beginning may be made full of significance, as when 
 Winston Churchill, in The Inside of the Cup, makes us 
 listen to the church bells of New York on a Sunday 
 morning. They have been silent through the week, and 
 now their clanging tones are the more arresting. They 
 represent the challenge which the religious world makes 
 to the workaday world, so triumphant on one day, so 
 ineffective on all the others. The workada}/ world, for 
 its part, is quite content to let the bells ring out in clear 
 supremacy on Sunday as long as the other six days are 
 free from the domination of those principles for which 
 the bells stand, and it is with this curious opposition that 
 the book, thus begun, very vividly deals. If we continue 
 to treat ' story ' in its broadest sense, Shakespeare's 
 beginnings provide a fruitful ground for study. The 
 storm in The Tempest betokens the confusion, distress, 
 and antagonism that can be reconciled only b}' youthful 
 love. The sentry's challenge in Hamlet represents the 
 irresistible questions put to those who have secured 
 place and power to which they have no rightful claim. 
 Leigh Hunt provides a good example of the evasive 
 beginning. He announces a subject. Getting up on Cold 
 Mornings, and proceeds to talk about a certain Italian 
 poet who has wi'itten a poem on insects. We wonder 
 what this can possibly have to do with the subject, and 
 curiosity prompts us to read on — which is, of course, 
 just what the author wishes us to do. He knows just 
 how long he may safely hold us in suspense without 
 sending us away in disgust. But one of the most effective 
 of all beginnings must surely be the opening sentence 
 of Bacon's essay Of Truth. "What is Truth? said 
 jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." 
 
 Endings are no less significant. That last speech of 
 148
 
 STORY AND SETTING 
 
 the penitent captain in Stevenson's Ebb-Tide, and the 
 telhng close of Christmas at Sea, already quoted ; the 
 touching sentence with which Motley concludes his 
 Rise of the Dutch Republic, and the prayer which Chaucer 
 offers at the close of the Canterbury Tales are very 
 different modes of ending, but are alike in effectiveness. 
 Andrew Lang has singled out the conclusion of Sohrab 
 and Rustum. The old warrior, stung by the taunt that 
 he was hoarding his fame, sallied forth in plain arms that 
 no man might know him, and engaged, all unwittingly, 
 in deadly combat with his own son Sohrab. Too late 
 he made the fateful discovery, and there he sat alone with 
 his grief : 
 
 But the majestic River floated on, 
 
 Out of the mist and hum of that low land 
 
 Into the frosty starlight. 
 
 The grand final scene in which Dickens loved to group all 
 his characters, and, after duly exposing the villain of the 
 piece, to send him crushed and mortified to a just retribu- 
 tion, is not a happy method. Thackeray's brisk manner 
 is better, and the last sentence of Vanity Fair is delight- 
 ful, though it does the book an injustice. " Come, 
 children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our 
 play is played out." 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE READING 
 
 In his Modern Study of Literature Professor R. G. Moulton 
 gives plot-schemes of Twelfth Xight, Hamlet, and Scott's 
 Monastery. Note the setting in Meredith's Love in the 
 Valley. In the course of it, as Mr G. M. Trevelyan points 
 out in The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith, we are 
 taken through all the seasons of the farmer's year, and the 
 
 149
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 appreciation of this provides the key to .the complete under- 
 standing of the poem. In Our Mutual Friend there are the 
 river and the dust-heap, l:)oth full of significance, while in 
 The Old Curiosity Shop we soon find ourselves on the Thames - 
 side wharf that consorts so well with the sinister influence 
 exercised throughout the book by Quilp, its owner. But 
 one of the finest examples of appropriate setting in all litera- 
 ture is to be found in the Book of Job. We first meet Job at 
 the feast — typical of the prosperity and joy that had hitherto 
 been his lot. Then comes the news of a long succession of 
 losses, each more overwhelming than that which preceded it, 
 followed by a loathsome infliction, and Job " sat among the 
 ashes." And on that ash-mound where, we are told, the 
 outcast and beggar still sit outside Eastern villages the 
 drama is played out to its conclusion. 
 
 EXERCISES 
 
 1 . Ruskin lays down these principles for the painter of historical 
 subjects : " Every figure which is unnecessary is an encumbrance. 
 Every figure which does not sympathize with the action, 
 interrupts it." Discuss the applicability of these rules to 
 prose-fiction. 
 
 2. Make plot-schemes for a play of Shakespeare, a Waverley 
 novel, and any modern novel that you have read. 
 
 3. Contrast the following from the point of view of character- 
 development : Prince Henry (in Henry IV), Sydney Carton, 
 Sir Percy Blakeney, Becky Sharp, and Portia (in llie Merchant of 
 Venice). 
 
 4. Comment upon the conclusions of the following : Twelfth 
 Night, The Tempest, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Newcomes, Maud. 
 
 5. " All works of art tell a story." Show briefly how this is 
 true, taking as examples a poem, a piece of sculpture, a building, 
 and a musical composition. 
 
 150
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 PERSONALITY AND STYLE 
 
 We might as well say that one man's shadow is j 
 another's as that the style of a really gifted mind can 
 belong to any but himself. It follows him about as 
 a shadow. His thought and feeling are personal, and 
 so his language is personal. J. H. Newman 
 
 THAT quality which we term personahty — the 
 revelation of the man behind the book — marks 
 all great literature. In the literature of modern 
 times its significance is indisputable. It is possible for a 
 practised reader to tell without much difficulty whether 
 a given passage was written by Macaulay or Addison, 
 Burke or Bunyan, Henry James or H. G. Wells. Or when 
 he" takes up Shakespeare's Henry VIII and compares 
 Queen Katharine's trial scene with the passages in 
 which she reproaches the two cardinals he is at once 
 conscious of a striking difference. Both occur in a play 
 which bears the name of Shakespeare ; but, as Sir Sidney 
 Lee observes, " no reader with an ear for metre can fail 
 to detect in the piece two rhythms, an inferior and a 
 superior rhythm. Two pens were clearly at work." 
 From one the ideas flow with such a rush that fto con- 
 ventional forms can contain them. Again and again the 
 accepted canons suffer. The movement is rapid and the 
 expression broken. The writer's white-hot imagination 
 twists and changes the ordered arrangement of the 
 sentences as molten lava will disturb and alter the rock-
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 masses through which it forces its way to the surface. 
 What the other pen gives us is, on the contrary, cahn and 
 methodical. Emotion is kept well in hand, and is never 
 allowed to overflow the bounds of the chosen metrical 
 form. There are no wild flights of imagery, no bewilder- 
 ing turns of thought. The reader fails to catch the 
 tones of Shakespeare in such a passage as this, with its 
 unfailing regularity and conventional imagery : 
 
 Alas ! poor wenches, where are now your fortunes ? 
 Shipwreck'd upon a kingdom where no pity, 
 No friends, no hope, no kindred weep for me ; 
 Almost no grave allow'd me. Like the lily, 
 I'll hang my head and perish. 
 
 Shakespeare may be the name upon the title-page, but 
 the hand is the hand of John Fletcher. This, on the 
 other hand, with its abruptness, its concentration, and 
 the unconventionality of its imagery is the true voice of 
 Shakespeare : 
 
 O ! many 
 
 Have broke their backs with laying manors on 'em 
 
 For this great journey. What did this vanity • 
 
 But minister communication of 
 
 A most poor issue. 
 
 Here, then, are two different styles reflecting two different 
 personalities. It is not a question of superficial tricks 
 and mannerisms, but a matter of essential individuality. 
 So when Shelley, apostrophizing the West Wind, says. 
 
 Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud ! 
 I fall upon the thorns of life ! I bleed ! 
 
 A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed 
 One too like thee : tameless and swift and proud, 
 
 he is giving us the key to the tragedy of his life and also 
 152
 
 PERSONALITY AND STYLE 
 
 revealing the true significance of his work. The passage 
 explains that eerie power of myth-making which makes 
 Shelley stand out among our EngHsh poets. He not only 
 saw the West Wind as a great being inhabiting vast 
 spaces ; he was himself, for the nonce, a being on the 
 same gigantic scale, and possessed congruous attributes. 
 And when the thorns of life lacerated him and roused him 
 to a sense of the realities of prosaic existence, it was a 
 sad and bitter disillusionment. Shelley wrote as he did 
 because he was Shelley. His style was not a manner 
 that he consciously assumed for a definite purpose, but 
 a mode of expression that followed naturally and inevit- 
 ably upon his own temperament. It is this inevitable 
 quality of all true style that we are sometimes apt to 
 forget, and Newman's metaphor of the shadow is particu- 
 larly valuable because it emphasizes this truth. St^^le is 
 something beyond the power of the man himself. He 
 may control, improve, and develop it, but he can no more 
 alter it essentially than he can change his personality. 
 It is as impossible for a writer who is really expressing 
 himself to drop his own style as it is for a man who is 
 walking in the sun to dispense with his own shadow in 
 favour of that of another man. Charles Lamb, keeping 
 open house in that unpretentious garret in Inner Temple 
 Lane, and revelling in the informal evenings spent there 
 with a few congenial spirits, could write in no other way 
 than in that intimate and whimsical fashion of his. And 
 Macaulay, the orator, whose every sentence, we are told, 
 " was perfectly devoured by the listeners " in the House 
 of Commons, could express himself on paper only in that 
 emphatic, antithetical manner that Brougham rather 
 spitefully called " Tom's snip-snap." 
 
 It is true that one man may parody the style of another, 
 
 153
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 just as one may mimic the gait of another. This, however, 
 is merely a bit of ingenious artistry where all the emphasis 
 is placed upon the manner. Such an imitation differs 
 from the original as the light of the moon differs from that 
 of the sun. Fire a man's mind with a great idea, or make 
 his imagination glow with a beautiful vision, and he will 
 have no choice of style. Indeed, he will scarcely give 
 it a thought : the idea or the vision will be aU in aU, and 
 the manner of presenting it will depend upon the manner 
 of man that he is. A clever parodist like J. C. Squire 
 can take The Lotos-Eaters, for example, and transpose 
 it into any style that he pleases. When he is writing 
 The Birds, however, he has no choice of style. He does 
 not stop to consider whether the work shall be done 
 after the manner of Masefield or B3n-on : it has to 
 be as Squire alone can write it, and therein lies its 
 main value. 
 
 We may also observe the working of personality in 
 the varying treatment of the same theme by two authors. 
 Wordsworth's Peter Bell is a characteristic counterblast 
 to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, and each poem is a 
 revelation of the man behind it. For Coleridge that 
 which is bizarre and improbable alone brings with it any 
 promise of romance. He has ceased to look for it in the 
 humdrum surroundings of ever^^day life. So when he 
 wishes to be wrapped in ecstasy he dreams of strange 
 places where nothing is more natural than the super- 
 natural, and the impossible is all-convincing. Thus the 
 phantom ship is quite in keeping with such a scene as 
 that which Coleridge pictures when, " without a breeze, 
 without a tide," it 
 
 drove suddenly 
 Betwixt us and the Sun. 
 
 154
 
 PERSONALITY AND STYLE 
 
 And straight the Sun was flecked with bars 
 (Heaven's Mother send us grace !) 
 As if through a dungeon-grate he peered 
 With broad and burning face. 
 
 Alas ! (thought I, and ray heart beat loud) 
 How fast she nears and nears ! 
 Are those her sails that glance in the Sun, 
 Like restless gossameres ? 
 
 The reader shudders : his reasoning faculties and the 
 common sense of which he is so proud are suspended, 
 for the spell is upon him as surely as it was upon the 
 unfortunate Wedding Guest. " The Mariner hath his 
 will. ' ' 
 
 But Wordsworth's method is quite different. He 
 purposely bids us stay at home in familiar scenes where 
 all the customary sanctions hold and where it is not so 
 easy to induce Reason to leave her throne. He does not 
 seek to enslave us by the all-compelling glance of some 
 mysterious seafarer, but confronts us with the prosaic 
 picture of a hawker beating his donkey. There was, it 
 would seem, little room for romance here : 
 
 At noon, when by the forest's edge 
 He lay beneath the branches high, 
 The soft blue sky did never melt 
 Into his heart ; he never felt 
 The witchery of the soft bUie sky. 
 
 Yet from such unpromising material did Wordsworth 
 seek to wring poetry, pathos, and romance. Instead of 
 atmosphere and suggestion we are given realism and 
 plain truths. 
 
 Or, again, Wordsworth's Skylark differs significantly 
 from the vision that Shelley gives. The one characteris- 
 tically praises the bird because it remains faithful to home 
 
 155
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 and to things of earth ; the other, with equal fitness, 
 lauds it because it scorns the ground and leaves earth far 
 behind. It is not so much the bird which either describes 
 as himself. 
 
 Environment has something to do with the matter. 
 The rugged and uncouth style of Sartor Resartus does not 
 seem out of place when we remember that it was written 
 in " the howling wilds of Craigenputtock. " Scott's 
 romantic youth in the Border Country at Sandyknowe, 
 spent in listening to the tales of the shepherd through the 
 day and to those of his grandmother at the evening 
 fireside, is a natural prelude to the long procession of 
 knights and ladies, minstrels and magicians, that crosses 
 his pages. So also Wordsworth's solitary walks by the 
 lakeside and over mountain paths are reflected in a style 
 that is at once simple, bleak, and grand. 
 
 Even those mannerisms upon which captious critics 
 are eager to fasten are valuable because they indicate 
 personalit}^ We learn to love a writer, warts and all, 
 and when we hear a rousing voice declaiming, " Who, 
 then, were mad but the Pallantids," or " Who, then, 
 were astonished as those knights," we have no difficulty 
 in recognizing the vigorous tones of Charles Kingsley. 
 So the repetition of the word ' meantime ' betrays Motley ; 
 the phrase ' no doubt ' shows Walter Pater's workman- 
 ship ; while a plentiful besprinkling of ' thither ' and 
 ' generality ' on a page reveals the hand of George Borrow. 
 Mr E. J. Payne, in a piece of acute criticism that deserves 
 a better fate than to be tucked away in a preface to 
 Burke's works, points out that writers have favourite 
 epithets. With Shakespeare it is ' sweet ' ; with Burke 
 it is ' great,' ' noble,' or ' liberal.' Milton is fond of the 
 word ' bright,' while Jeremy Taylor has a natural liking 
 156
 
 PERSONALITY AND STYLE 
 
 for ' eternal.' Kipling excites our curiosity with the 
 phrase " But that is another story." Meredith is easily 
 to be recognized by his queer inversions, such as " Else 
 die we " and " Chimed they in one." Scott bursts upon 
 us with a challenging rhetorical question : " Breathes 
 there a man ? " " Lives there a strain ? " or else he 
 favours the reader with superfluous explanations revealing 
 an honest pride that is far removed from snobbery : " The 
 Earl, for no less exalted was his station," or " ' May 
 Heaven,' said he, looking upward." Keats was fond of 
 dew and shady springs and valleys, Wordsworth liked 
 the open sea and bare uplands, Tennyson the lulling 
 sound of falling water. A true reader takes pleasure in 
 recognizing such personal touches even when the}^ are so 
 marked as to become failings. 
 
 There are, however, critics who deny that personality 
 has any place in great literature. The business of the 
 good writer, they say, is to eliminate it. He has to get 
 rid of those individual eccentricities that separate him 
 from the rest of humanity, and to emphasize all those 
 qualities that proclaim a community of spirit with his 
 fellows. When he learns to express, not those feelings and 
 aspirations that are peculiar to himself, but those that are 
 common to all, then, and not till then, he begins to write 
 good and abiding literature. This seems at first sight a 
 likely doctrine. The great topics of literature are certainly 
 those happenings and experiences that make us all kin. 
 Death, for instance, as the door through which we all 
 must pass, bulks large on the pages of our books. We 
 can no more escape it in our literature than in our daily 
 life. But there are two ways of looking at death. We 
 may regard it as the fate that dogs all existing things, 
 or we may look upon it as a personal experience. As a 
 
 157
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 common phenomenon, robbed of the poignancy associated 
 with personal suffering and loss, it never yet made a 
 human heart beat the faster nor caused a single tear to 
 flow. The statement that we all must die, on account 
 of its very universality, comes home to nobody. As it 
 is true of all created things there is no reason why one man 
 should show concern more than another. It is like those 
 home-thrusts in a sermon that each listener is zealously 
 directing to his neighbour. But death as revealed in 
 personality affects each individual reader. He hears 
 the cry of despair wrung from the poor wretch who is 
 shuddering on the brink, and he finds that he too is 
 gazing timorously into the depths of the same chill 
 stream. Or he watches the calm indifference with which 
 the philosopher receives the dread visitant, and the sight 
 braces his nerves ; he feels that he also can be brave. 
 Or, again, he sees one to whom life has brought nothing 
 but disillusionment, and as he listens to the captive's 
 cry for freedom he realizes that there are circumstances 
 in which death would be welcome indeed. So he may 
 turn to Claudio's terror-stricken appeal in Measure for 
 Measure : 
 
 Ay, but to die, and go we know not where ; 
 / To lie in cold obstruction and to rot ; 
 
 ) Tliis sensible warm motion to become 
 
 / A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit 
 
 ' To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside 
 
 / In thrilling region of tliick-ribbed ice ; 
 
 To be imprison 'd in the viewless winds, 
 J And blown with restless violence round about 
 
 I The pendent world ; or to be worse than worst 
 
 Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts 
 \ Imagine howling : 't is too horrible ! 
 
 ( The weariest and most loathed worldly life 
 
 That age, aclie, penury and imprisonment 
 1^8
 
 PERSONALITY AND STYLE 
 
 Can lay on nature is a paradise 
 To what we fear of death. 
 
 Or he may read the more comfortable philosophy which 
 is contained in Blanco White's famous sonnet : 
 
 Mysterious Night ! when our first parent knew \ 
 
 Thee from report divine, and heard thy name, / 
 
 Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, \ 
 
 This glorious canopy of light and blue ? i 
 
 Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, 
 
 Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, 
 Hesperus with the host of heaven came, ; 
 
 And lo ! creation widened in man's view. 
 
 Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed 
 
 Within thy beams, O Sun ! or who could find. 
 Whilst flow'r and leaf and insect stood revealed, 
 
 That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind ! 
 Why do we, then, shun Death with anxious strife ? 
 If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life ? 
 
 Or he may listen with Keats to the rapturous song of the 
 nightingale, until to him also 
 
 seems it rich to die. 
 To cease upon the midnight with no pain. 
 
 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad 
 In such an ecstasy ! 
 
 There is something in his own breast that responds to all 
 these different views of a great problem. Tell him of the 
 fate that is common to all, and he remains unmoved : 
 show him how it concerns a particular man or woman, 
 and he is immediately touched ; a kinship is established, 
 no matter how widely opinions may diverge. Love and 
 life, death and sleep, and the other universal experiences 
 that form the raw material of literature have neither 
 meaning nor interest unless interpreted in personality, 
 and the expression of that personality is style. 
 
 159
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 The element of personality, strong as it is in modern 
 literature, would seem, however, to vanish completely 
 when we come to consider that of more ancient times. 
 Reference has already been made to that important 
 transition when literature was first ' fixed ' by being 
 committed to writing. Before that time authorship had 
 been collective, and private property in literary matter 
 did not exist. The great mass of traditional literature 
 was available for anyone who was sufficiently interested 
 to appropriate it to himself, and possession by knowledge 
 was indeed nine points of the law. The body of communal 
 writing, touched and retouched by countless hands, is 
 like a composite photograph in which it is quite useless 
 to attempt to trace any individual lineaments. There 
 is in it no individuality as we understand it. But to 
 jump to the conclusion that there is also no personality 
 in it is to assume too much. There is personality behind 
 the composite photograph, although it is true that we are 
 unable to refer the likeness to any particular person. 
 Whatever difficulty there may be arises not from the lack, 
 but from the excess of personality. So many individuals 
 are involved that the common characteristics only are 
 shown. So with the older literature. Each story- 
 teller revealed his personality in the telhng of his tale. 
 The matter that was handed on was raw material merely, 
 which he was free to edit and adapt at will according to 
 his own ideas of what was necessary and fitting. It 
 is true that few of the personal touches by which the 
 story-teller impressed himself upon his audience have 
 survived the transference from tradition to paper. 
 Nevertheless we must not forget that communal literature 
 is made ug of the work of individual artists. They may 
 be forgotten, but that does not alter the fact that their 
 i6o
 
 PERSONALITY AND STYLE 
 
 work remains — the work of individuals. It is difficult 
 now to trace with any degree of certainty the devices, 
 once so potent, that held great crowds spell-bound ; 
 nor can we recognize the hands that lopped off much that 
 was irrelevant and tedious, gradually bringing out the 
 essential and the abiding into sharp relief, and giving 
 the story something like a workmanlike shape. Yet 
 those personal traits are there, and the traditional litera- 
 ture to which we owe so much could not exist without 
 them. It is certainly a mistake to suppose that per- 
 sonality is a comparatively recent development. It has 
 merely changed its appearance. Individual personality 
 may not be reflected in communal literature, but we are 
 bound to recognize in it the revelation of communal 
 personality. The rugged outlines hacked out by the 
 Northern craftsmen in their mythology are very different 
 from the smooth and graceful contours swept by the hand 
 of the Greek. Odin is characteristically unlike Zeus. 
 The one is massive and mysterious ; the other intelligible 
 and almost companionable. So the tales of the East, 
 with their fatalism, their deHcious leisure, and their 
 intricate richness of imagery, are not to be mistaken for 
 those of the West, with their simple directness and 
 rapidity. Races have a definite personaUty as expressed 
 in language and literature. The great French critic 
 Brunetiere has shown us how fascinating it is to watch 
 the development of this personality and to see how the 
 mastery of the various forms has been acquired in 
 successive literatures. History repeats itself here as 
 elsewhere ; the lonely figure of Lucretius reappears, 
 with certain characteristic differences, in the equally 
 lonely figure of Milton. The one showed that the Latin 
 language could be made the vehicle of sustained thought 
 II i6i
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 on a high plane : the other performed a similar service 
 for English. But with aU the fascination of tracing an 
 undoubted likeness, it is necessary to stress the dif- 
 ferences : Milton was so much more than an English 
 Lucretius that we get the ever-recurring marvel of 
 personality from yet another angle. 
 
 Ages too have a personality. The formal and im- 
 personal mediaeval literature is, as Professor Brett has 
 pointed out, the natural expression of the mediaeval 
 schoolman's love of system and of his insistence on the 
 universal. In the same way the philosophy of the 
 Renaissance, with its sense of the importance of the will 
 and the emotions, is reflected in Shakespeare and in the 
 rise of the novel. And just as the artificiality and pre- 
 cision of the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries is the outcome of the growth of natural science, 
 so the vers libre of contemporary poets, and the general 
 impatience of form, is an apt expression of the spirit of 
 revolt that is abroad to-day. 
 
 But there are those whom these things move not. 
 They decry style as an evil thing. They sneer at the 
 ' inevitable ' word, and laugh at artistic ' effects.' 
 Prominent among these are Samuel Butler, of Erewhon 
 fame, and his very apt pupil George Bernard Shaw. The 
 former says, for example, that he never knew a writer 
 yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at 
 the same time readable. Taking the cue from him, Mr 
 Shaw, in the preface to Man and Superman, calls style 
 " a pleasant parlour game," and proceeds to assert that 
 style is never achieved for its own sake. All that is 
 necessary, we are told, is for a writer to have something 
 to assert. " He who has nothing to assert has no style 
 and can have none : he who has something to assert will 
 162
 
 PERSONALITY AND STYLE 
 
 go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his 
 conviction will carry him. . , . Your Royal Academician 
 thinks he can get the style of Giotto without Giotto's 
 beliefs, and correct his perspective into the bargain. 
 Your man of letters thinks he can get Bunyan's or 
 Shakespeare's style without Bunyan's conviction or 
 Shakespeare's apprehension, especially if he takes care 
 not to split his infinitives." Now it is characteristic of 
 Mr Shaw to begin by making a startling assertion to 
 tickle the fancy of the heterodox, and then to proceed to 
 defend and elaborate it in such a way that he shows him- 
 self to be not very far from the orthodox position after 
 all. When he states that the prime requisite for the 
 Shakespearean style is a Shakespearean spirit, he is 
 proclaiming a truth to which all thoughtful readers must 
 subscribe. We can afford to overlook the gibe at " your 
 men of letters," and even welcome the other exaggera- 
 tions as likely to compel the attention of those who 
 would probably ignore a quieter and more exact state- 
 ment. It was well that the emphasis should be placed 
 so strongly upon the cardinal virtue of sincerity, but it 
 is no new doctrine, and it certainly did not originate with 
 Butler or Shaw. When Butler says that " a man's 
 style should be like his clothes, neat, well-cut, and such 
 as not to call any attention to him at all," he is saying 
 no more than has been said over and over again by 
 despised men of letters. Indeed, if we must choose, 
 Newman's metaphor of the shadow seems truer and more 
 apt, because it brings out the very point that Mr Shaw has 
 stressed, namely, that style to be worth anything at all 
 must be perfectly natural. But natural powers may be 
 cultivated or neglected. When Robert Louis Stevenson 
 " played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Words- 
 
 163
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 worth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, 
 to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann " he was 
 playing no " pleasant parlour game." He was serving 
 a hard and necessary apprenticeship to the craft of letters, 
 and forging a style which was to become one of the most 
 sincere and individual things in our Uterature. He, like 
 any other healthy-minded man, did not take those 
 efforts too seriously. He called them " monkey tricks." 
 But, on the other hand, he knew better than to be ashamed 
 of them. A time came when his instrument was perfect ; 
 when he could forget both it and himself in his message. 
 Then, when he ceased to think about style, he first began 
 to produce it. When he forgot to be anxious about 
 himself he first began truly to express himself. 
 
 And with so many different personalities all engaged 
 in self-expression there will naturally be a multiphcity 
 of varying styles. With some it is abrupt and uncouth ; 
 with others it is polished and refined. One man startles 
 you into attention : another steals into your conscious- 
 ness almost unawares. Whatever enables a writer most 
 effectually and most naturally to secure self-expression 
 is style. And the excellence of that style is in proportion 
 to its sincerity. As Mr Edmund Gosse has reminded us, 
 sincerity is " the finest gift in literature and the most 
 uncommon." It is, indeed, the only standard. All 
 others are artificial and temporary. They may suit the 
 prevaihng taste in a particular age, or jump with a certain 
 type of humour, but another age and an altered humour 
 will be sure to revise very drastically any judgments 
 made according to such canons. So Pope, whom Voltaire 
 declared to be " the best poet of all England, and at 
 present of all the world," is studiously neglected by a 
 later generation, while John Bunyan, who is to Addison, 
 164
 
 PERSONALITY AND STYLE 
 
 so Hume asserts, as the molehill to the mountain, has 
 been translated into eighty languages and dialects. 
 Horace Walpole, " the glass of fashion " in his day, was 
 as far from the truth as fashionable judges usually are 
 when he said that the first writers in England in 1753 
 were Lord Chesterfield, Lord Bath, Mr W. Whithed, Sir 
 Charles Williams, Mr Soame Jenyns, Mr Cambridge, and 
 Mr Coventry. So to-day we are led to despise Tennyson 
 because he did not write vers libre, and to glorify the 
 ' Georgian ' poet because he so plainly shows his con- 
 tempt for all the forms that the Victorian deemed sacro- 
 sanct. With the good bookman the capital error is 
 intolerance, and such considerations have little weight. 
 He takes delight in watching the unfolding of divers 
 personalities in widely varying ways, and he learns to be 
 humble and catholic in his taste. He can admire In 
 Memoriam as well as Fleet Street Eclogues : his appre- 
 ciation of H. G. Wells is not lessened because he persists 
 in seeing some good in Walter Pater. 
 
 Too often, however, abruptness and brutality of ex- 
 pression are regarded as the distinguishing mark of 
 sincerity. It is possible to make a pose of uncouthness. 
 The aesthete on his knees before a blue china vase and the 
 iconoclast who rudely smashes the idol are probably both 
 poseurs. They are alike in a desire to draw attention to 
 themselves : the precise method they choose for so doing 
 is a matter of comparative indifference. The need of 
 sincerity has been emphasized in connexion with all the 
 various literary devices that we have been consideringly 
 Again and again in these pages it has been urged that 
 contrast, rhythm, and verse-forms, assonance, conson- 
 ance, and figures of speech are not, in true literature, super- 
 ficial ornaments or exhibitions of verbal jugglery : they are 
 
 165
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 rather the results that arise naturally and inevitably 
 from the harmony wrought by spirit between mind and 
 matter, and spirit is but another name for personality. 
 If the resultant expression is not sincere, then it has no 
 claim to be called literature. Those who clamour for 
 beauty of form regardless of content, and those who 
 insist upon truth of matter careless of the form, are at 
 cross-purposes. There can be no real beauty of form 
 without truth, and truth would be false to its own nature 
 did it not clothe itself in a garb that is fitting and beauti- 
 ful. The supposed opposition simply does not exist. 
 
 " Beauty is truth, truth beauty," — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE READING 
 
 John Sterling's attempts to reform Carlyle's style form the 
 most piquant feature of the Life of Sterling. Carlyle sub- 
 mitted to treatment more good-humouredly than might be 
 expected, but without avail. As he characteristically puts 
 it (ch. iii), " This is not your suit of clothes, it must be 
 another's." There is an excellent paper on Ruskin's style 
 in Sir Edward Cook's Literary Recreations, while Ruskin 
 himself deals with the general question of style in Lectures 
 on Art (III). The necessity of sincerity on which he lays so 
 much stress is emphasized by any and every writer of moment 
 who has put down his thoughts on the subject. Another 
 example of the influence of environment may be seen in 
 Church's Spenser (p. 88), where the author says, " It is idle 
 to speculate what difference of form the Faerie Qtieene might 
 have received, if the design had been carried out in the peace 
 of England and in the society of London. But it is certain 
 that the scene of trouble and danger in which it grew up 
 greatly affected it." Lascelles Abercrombie uses this idea 
 i66
 
 PERSONALITY AND STYLE 
 
 in The Epic to show the difference between Homer and 
 Beowulf. Reference may also be made to Willmott's Pleasures 
 of Literature (ch. viii) and Hamerton's Intellectual Life 
 (Part XII, Letter I). J. W. Mackail in Latin Literature 
 draws attention to interesting parallels between that litera- 
 ture and our own. In a footnote to p. 385 oi An Intro- 
 duction to the Study of Literature W. H. Hudson quotes two 
 or three striking examples of contemporary criticism. 
 
 EXERCISES 
 
 I. Read the following passages carefully, noting any pecu- 
 liarities of style that seem to betray the authorship. Say to 
 what conclusion you are led in each case. 
 
 (a) Music do I hear ? 
 
 Ha I Ha ! keep time. How sour sweet music is 
 
 When time is broke and no proportion kept ! 
 
 So is it in the music of men's lives. 
 
 And here have I the daintiness of ear 
 
 To check time broke in a disorder'd string ; 
 
 But for the concord of my state and time 
 
 Had not an ear to hear my true time broke. 
 
 I wasted time, and now doth time waste me ; 
 
 For now hath time made me his numbering clock : 
 
 My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar 
 
 Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, 
 
 Whereto my finger, like a dial's point. 
 
 Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. 
 
 (6) When you are past shrieking, having no human articulate 
 voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of their 
 valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with 
 cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive 
 hiccough of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sorrow - 
 fullest spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, taking the 
 deep inner significance of them, are the English mobs in the 
 valley of Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing rusty 
 howitzers ; and the Swiss vintagers of Zurich expressing 
 their Christian thanks for the gift of the vine, by assembling 
 in knots in the " towers of the vineyards," and slowly loading 
 and firing horse-pistols from morning till evening. 
 
 167
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 (c) But follow ; let the torrent dance thee down 
 To find him in the valley ; let the wild 
 Lean-headed Eagles yelp alone, and leave 
 The monstrous ledges there to slope, and spill 
 Their thousand wreaths of dangling water-smoke, 
 That like a broken purpose waste in air : 
 
 So waste not thou. 
 
 (d) But you don't know music ! Wherefore 
 
 Keep on casting pearls 
 To a — poet ! All I care for 
 
 Is — to tell him that a girl's 
 
 " Love " comes aptly in when gruff 
 Grows his singing. (There, enough !) 
 
 2. Ruskin says, " No noble or right style was ever yet founded 
 but out of a sincere heart." Discuss and illustrate this. 
 
 3. Show the reaction of environment on style in the case of 
 Byron and Bums respectively. 
 
 4. Give examples of literary mannerisms other than those 
 mentioned in the text. 
 
 5. " There must be," says Emerson, " a man behind the book." 
 Discuss this, adding the most noteworthy examples that occur 
 to you. 
 
 168
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE SUBLIME 
 Sublimity is the echo of a great soul. 
 
 LONGINUS 
 
 /4 S we noted in a preceding chapter, it has been said 
 / \ that for the true appreciation of the best of the 
 JL ^Waverley novels it is necessary to read them 
 through at least six times. Certainly it cannot be dis- 
 puted that if a book is worth reading at all it is worth 
 rereading. Only thus can the reader have the oppor- 
 tunity of noting some of the many delights of hterature. 
 While he will not be so fooUsh as to despise that 
 elemental pleasure in the breathless rush with which a 
 vivacious story-teller carries him from point to point, 
 he will nevertheless find it well worth while to retrace 
 his steps and survey the ground at greater leisure. So he 
 will be able to cast a dehghted eye upon beautiful scenes 
 lurking in unexpected corners, and catch sweet melodies 
 that would be quite inaudible in the hurly-burly. He 
 will have time, too, to study the personality of his author 
 and guide, and to recognize in his tones that sincerity 
 which is the unfailing mark of all memorable writing. 
 
 We have seen how differently personalities express 
 themselves, and that it would be useless to expect the 
 precision of Addison from Carlyle, for example, or the 
 breadth of Charles Dickens from Jane Austen. In the 
 same way it is found that the work of one author is by 
 no means all upon one level. There are few, if any, 
 
 169
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 writers whom we can classify, without quaHfication, as 
 first-, second-, or third-rate. The greatest will suddenly 
 lapse into the banal, and astonish the devotee who has 
 been fed exclusively upon choice snippets ; while even the 
 worst will upon occasion approach the sublime heights 
 so nearly as to confound the critics. At times maximum 
 power will happily coincide with maximum opportunity ; 
 personality at its highest will find fitting expression ; 
 and the greatness of the soul wiU be echoed in the writing : 
 then, and then only, we have the truly sublime. 
 
 The sublime knows no rules — at least, none that can be 
 applied by any outside authority. Longinus, it is true, 
 speaks of the necessity of the curb as weU as the spur for 
 Pegasus, and shows that it is in the highest flights of 
 grandeur that the writer is in greatest danger of losing 
 his balance. But only the writer himself can guard 
 effectively against that danger. No theoretical direc- 
 tions given him before he makes the ascent will insure 
 that he wiU be able to cope successfully with unexpected 
 difficulties. He must, in the event, depend upon his own 
 resourcefulness. So, in this matter of the sublime, the 
 critic has to beware of hasty judgments, and will find it 
 best to preserve a becoming humility. Prognostications 
 are vain as often as not. A writer, the general level of 
 whose work encourages one to believe that he will accom- 
 plish the great feat, may prove a sad disappointment 
 after all ; while another who has been contemptuously 
 disregarded does it while the critic's back is turned. The 
 sublime crops up in all manner of unexpected places : 
 it keeps strange company at times. Herein is seen the 
 wisdom of that wise tolerance for which a plea was made 
 in an earlier chapter. If we allow prejudice to blind us 
 to the sublime in work which bears the stamp of an alien 
 170
 
 THE SUBLIME 
 
 creed or party, then assuredly the loss is ours. Or if, as 
 is yet more likely, we allow ourselves to be affected by 
 priggishness of taste so as to declare that no good can 
 possibly come out of Nazareth, then we are wilfully 
 hmiting our range. That great man, John Henry 
 Newman, never showed his greatness more than when, 
 addressing the students of a Catholic university, he paid 
 generous and ungrudging tribute to the subhmity of 
 Protestant literature. There are, it must be emphasized, 
 neither rules nor boundaries in this matter. Here a 
 painstaking writer misses the highest, while there another 
 achieves it with an apparently undisciplined exuberance 
 that defies all the canons. You may light upon it in the 
 dustiest corners. A jewel will often dazzle you in the 
 dark basement where forgotten tomes repose. It may 
 occur in prose as well as in verse ; in a sermon as well as 
 in a novel. It may even appear in that most despised of 
 all literary efforts — a book about books. You will 
 remember how the reading of Longinus moved the cold 
 and sceptical Gibbon to enthusiasm, so that he declared : 
 " I almost doubt which is more sublime. Homer's Battle 
 of the Gods, or Longinus's Apostrophe to Terentianus 
 upon it." Neither are there any restrictions to be laid 
 down with regard to the subject-matter. One writer 
 will find a sublime subject in a wayside flower or a peasant 
 child ; another in a sounding cataract or a devastating 
 storm ; yet another in chimney-pots or a city slum. 
 Or the same poet may sing at one moment of 
 
 Old, unhappy, far-ofi things, 
 And battles long ago, 
 
 and again just as sweetly of 
 
 Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain. 
 That has been, and may be again. 
 
 171
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Here again the reader must be catholic in his taste : 
 neither reahst nor romanticist has a monopoly. Coleridge 
 will see the sublime in " the stately pleasure dome " 
 
 Where Alph, the sacred river, ran 
 Through caverns measureless to man 
 Down to a sunless sea ; 
 
 whereas Masefield will say : 
 
 Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould. 
 
 Of the maimed, of the halt, and the blind in the rain and 
 
 the cold — 
 Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. 
 
 This is one of the chief delights of reading. We are 
 for ever being taken by surprise. There is always the 
 possibility that a bit of superb expression is lurking 
 overleaf, and the humblest reader is as likely to meet 
 with unsuspected beauties as the most learned professor. 
 There is nothing like Hterature, rightly used, for encour- 
 aging self-reliance, or for bringing out the essential 
 nobility in both reader and writer. The idea that reading 
 turns a man into a mere bookworm, and unfits him for 
 the practical duties of life, is as baseless as the kindred 
 notion that literature is opposed to life. As Emerson 
 tells us, " All that Shakespeare says of the king, yonder 
 slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of 
 himself." So the recognition of the sublime, where all 
 the literary qualities and devices that we have been 
 discussing are found doing their perfect work, is the 
 reward that awaits the reader. And the recognition of 
 sublimity in the author's work inevitably calls forth in 
 response all the sublimity of which the reader is capable. 
 Julius Caesar, referring to some political prisoners whom 
 he had set free, wrote thus to Cicero : 
 172
 
 THE SUBLIME 
 
 I triumph and rejoice that my action should have secured 
 your approval. Nor am I disturbed when I hear it said that 
 those, whom I have sent off alive and free, will again bear 
 arms against me ; for there is nothing which I so much 
 covet as that I should be like myself and they like themselves. 
 
 In the margin against that passage Macaulay wrote the 
 words, " Noble fellow ! " It is indeed sublime — the 
 echoing of a great soul — and the recognition of it as 
 convincing a testimony as could be desired to the nobiHty 
 of Macaulay himself. And for a modem counterpart of 
 that wonderful magnanimity let us pass to a magnifi- 
 cent chapter in The Cities of Spain, where Edward 
 Hutton tells how he visited the monastery of Santo 
 Tomas, and, asking the Father to show him anything 
 within that was noteworthy, found that he was strangely 
 reluctant. " Perhaps to-morrow," was all that he 
 would say. Mr Hutton then returned to Avila, to find 
 it occupied by a party of tourists under the leader- 
 ship of one who was loudly boasting of how he had spat 
 upon the grave of Torquemada at Santo Tomas. Our 
 author continues : 
 
 It was night when I returned to Santo Tomas, but the 
 Father was waiting for me in the Sacristy. After a 
 minute he said, " My son, you are troubled, you are angry, 
 what has happened ? It is not well to sleep when one is 
 angry." And somehow I told him all. Once or twice he 
 smiled, but there were tears in his eyes as he led me, in the 
 midst of that great room, to the bare slab of slate beneath 
 which Torquemada sleeps. " It is true," he said, " we have 
 forgiven him." There was a long silence, and then with a 
 great deference he turned towards me and said, " If you 
 will, seiior, we will pray for him, and for us all, because — 
 is it not so ? — where one who is in trouble is left unaided, 
 there passes an executioner ; and where two or three are 
 gathered together in unkindness, there is the Inquisition . " As
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 we knelt I saw him wipe away the mark of scorn from the 
 grave with the sleeve of his cloak. 
 
 The manifest sincerity of that passage and its splendid 
 reticence surely justify its inclusion as an example of 
 the sublime. 
 
 However inadvisable it may be to attempt to hedge 
 round sublimity with rules, it may be asserted with 
 confidence that it is not a piece of artifice — a bit of fine 
 writing superimposed so as to give distinction to the 
 mass of dull, journeyman stuff. Hilaire Belloc playfully 
 says that he thinks that the best way of ending a book 
 "is to rummage about among one's manuscripts till 
 one has found a bit of Fine Writing (no matter upon 
 what subject), to lead up the last paragraphs by no 
 matter what violent shocks to the thing it deals with, 
 to introduce a row of asterisks, and then to paste on to 
 the paper below these the Fine Writing one has found." 
 There is certainly much of this fine writing in existence, 
 and it is perfectly true that it matters little where it is 
 put. After all, it is in itself but a harmless flourish. 
 The harm enters when fine writing is confused with the 
 sublime — a mistake which no thoughtful reader can be 
 forgiven for making. One is an artificial ornament : the 
 other is a natural growth. The beautiful song. 
 
 Fear no more the heat o' the sun, 
 Nor the furious winter's rages, 
 
 that Guiderius and Arviragus sang over the body of 
 Cloten is not a bit of fine writing * stuck on ' : we cannot 
 for one moment regard it as a tour de force that Shake- 
 speare kept in reserve until he should come upon a blank 
 space that it would fit. It has, it is true, a beauty of 
 its own that remains even when it is torn from its con- 
 174
 
 THE SUBLIME 
 
 text, but unless it comes, as it were, straight from the 
 mouths of the singers it cannot be appreciated to the 
 full. So George Meredith's sweet nocturne, 
 
 Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping 
 
 Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. 
 Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, 
 
 Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar, 
 
 is charming in itself ; but read the whole of Love in the 
 Valley and it takes on a new glory. And the pathetic 
 significance of John Clare's plaint, 
 
 I am ! yet what I am who cares or knows ? 
 My friends forsake me like a memory lost ; 
 I am the self-consumer of my woes, 
 They rise and vanish, an oblivious host. 
 Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost ; 
 And yet I am ! 
 
 is missed unless all the circumstances of his sad career 
 are known. 
 
 The sublime, then, is most emphatically not a bit of 
 clever craftsmanship displayed in such a manner as to 
 attract the reader's attention. Nor is it necessarily 
 violent or obtrusive. " They are," as Ruskin reminds 
 us in Modern Painters, " but the blunt and the low 
 faculties of our nature which can only be addressed 
 through lamp-black and lightning. It is in quiet and 
 subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep, 
 and the calm, and the perpetual ; that which must be 
 sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood . . . 
 that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the 
 blessing of beauty given." And what is true of pictorial 
 art is true also of literature. " That which must be 
 sought," says Ruskin, and in this matter of the sublime 
 the necessity of diligent, personal search cannot be 
 
 175
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 over-emphasized. It is so easy to admire by proxy, 
 and to rest upon the comforting assurance that as others 
 have laboured all that we need do is to enter into their 
 labours. Yet the search can only be effective when 
 carried out in person. Others may go before and point 
 the way, but we must follow. Little of real gain will be 
 ours if we sit at home expecting the jewels to be brought 
 to us without effort on our part. Anthologies, indeed, 
 have subtle dangers of their own, in that they provide 
 a short cut to the acquisition of knowledge that is, in 
 itself, worthless and even harmful. It has been pointed 
 out that a collection of the choicest passages, wrongly 
 used, will serve to lower the taste instead of raising it, 
 like a diet exclusively composed of highly seasoned food 
 and stimulating drinks. The easy credit for wide 
 reading that may be obtained by the cultivation of 
 anthologies is a snare which every reader has sooner or 
 later to learn to avoid. 
 
 Yet it is a very old and sound principle that " the 
 abuse of a thing doth not take away the lawful use 
 thereof," and while the misuse of collections of literary 
 ' gems ' has undoubtedly been responsible for much 
 harm, it would be foolish in the extreme to neglect, on 
 that account, the help that a good anthology is able 
 to give. " Private readers," says Emerson, " reading 
 purely for love of the book, would serve us by leaving 
 each the shortest note of what he has found." This 
 is precisely what the good anthologist does, and it is well 
 for us to compare notes with him. So we may experience 
 the delight of confirmation — here is a man who agrees 
 with me that such-and-such a piece is worthy of a place 
 among the best. Or we may be driven to make a salutary 
 and humble confession — here is one who, fishing in the 
 176
 
 THE SUBLIME 
 
 same waters, has made a catch where I could find nothing. 
 Or again, we may be roused to dissent because to us some 
 of the inclusions are as incomprehensible as the exclusions. 
 However this may be, the chif f advantages to be gained 
 from the study of any such collection are that it sends 
 us back to old favourites and, maybe, reveals new excel- 
 lences in them, and also that it shows where there is new 
 and fruitful ground to be explored. 
 
 In The Golden Treasury, for example, the devoted skill 
 of Palgrave gives the gem a fresh setting and places it 
 in a new light. As he tells us, he discards the rigidly 
 chronological sequence and arranges the pieces instead 
 " in gradations of feeling and subject." The result is 
 the production of a volume that must ever be dear to the 
 lover of English poetry. So Wordsworth's Green Linnet 
 and Cuckoo are placed side by side with Keats's Ode to 
 a Nightingale. By this arrangement, as David Somervell 
 points out in his Companion to the Golden Treasury, each 
 poem is made to act as an illuminating commentary 
 upon the others. In the first the poet describes the bird 
 as he sees it : his observation is keener and his expres- 
 sion more just than anything which most of us could 
 do for ourselves, yet for all that it remains but simple 
 observation. In the second Wordsworth describes the 
 cry of the cuckoo, but he proceeds to give expression to 
 the thought that he has changed since as a boy he first 
 listened to that selfsame song ; thus the simple act of 
 observing is carried on a stage further and becomes a 
 reflection. Then Keats in the third poem just catches 
 the notes of the nightingale's song and goes off into a 
 wonderful day-dream that he unfolds in one of the finest 
 odes in our tongue. To set one poem against another in 
 this way is an exercise at once deUghtful and instructive. 
 T2 177
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 But, formally or informally, each one as he reads 
 should be busy about the making of his own anthology — 
 the only one, that for him can really satisfy. In that 
 fine collection, The Spirit )oj Man, made jby the Poet 
 Laureate we have a model of what such an anthology 
 should be. Here a wise and gifted reader has noted 
 down subhmities as he found them and has passed on 
 the notes fo/r our use and encouragement. The breadth 
 of vision and the fine taste required for such a compila- 
 tion are given to few, but every reader has a personality 
 of his own and the value of an anthology of this kind lies 
 in the fact that it expresses the personality of the reader 
 even as the selections themselves show forth those of 
 the several writers. The making of such a collection in 
 a cathoUc and humble spirit will be one of the most 
 valuable and individual acts of which the reader is 
 capable. Thus he will express his own preferences to 
 himself, and therefore, while he will neglect no means 
 of raising his standard of judgment, he will allow neither 
 tradition nor fashion to have undue sway. The very 
 act of setting down upon paper that which he sincerely 
 feels to be memorable writing will do more to teach 
 him to discipline his taste than any theoretical instruc- 
 tions or warnings could possibly do. Most effectually 
 he will be his own judge ; for, from time to time, he will 
 amend and reject, either confirming or modif5dng his 
 former selections as a broader experience and more 
 delicate appreciation dictate. Some old favourites, 
 being found not to wear well, he will reject firmly, yet 
 not without a pardonable reluctance : other new dis- 
 coveries he will add as a sign that his love of literature is 
 alive — ever growing and expanding. To those passages 
 that remain he will constantly recur until they form 
 178
 
 THE SUBLIME 
 
 part of his being, the very^'crown of all his reading, and 
 a never-faiUng treasure-store from which he may draw 
 solace and inspiration. 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE READING 
 
 There is a deUghtful chapter in Sir Edward Cook's Literary 
 Recreations entitled " A Study in Superlatives " that will 
 amply repay reading. David Somervell's Companion to the 
 Golden Treasury is invaluable — a model of what such a 
 commentary should be. Robert Bridges' anthology, The 
 Spirit of Man, cannot be too strongly recommended to those 
 readers who are attempting to make anthologies for them- 
 selves. The volumes in the " Poetry and Life " series 
 (Harrap) are very helpful in that they give just that know- 
 ledge of the poet's life and circumstances which is essential to 
 a sympathetic understanding of his work. Several examples 
 of reticence were cited in connexion with Chapter IX ; to 
 these may be added, as showing the sublimity of restraint, 
 Plutarch's Leuctra, the description of Waterloo in Vanity 
 Fair, and Milton's account of the death of Samson. Above 
 all, the student should read and reread Longinus on the 
 Sublime, of which there is a rendering by A. O. Prickard in 
 the " Oxford Library of Translations." 
 
 EXERCISES 
 
 1. Rupert Brooke irreverently referred to Tennyson as " that 
 old fool." A Morning Post critic dismissed Carlyle as " a 
 Prussian parasite whose style so often resembles coal arriving 
 next door." Taking these two statements for a text, write on 
 " Fashion in Literature." 
 
 2. " Nobody ever yet agreed with anybody else's golden 
 treasury of elegant extracts." Criticize any well-kno\vn antho- 
 logy, specifying omissions and additions that you would wish 
 to make. 
 
 179
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 3. Discuss the claims of the following to sublimity : 
 
 (a) Dickens's description of the death of little Paul Dombey. 
 (6) Lamb's Dream Children. 
 
 (c) Casablanca. 
 
 {d) Addison's paper on the death of Sir Roger. 
 
 [e) Browning's Sordello. 
 
 [f) Shakespeare's sonnet, " V^lien to the sessions of sweet 
 
 silent thought." 
 
 4. Comment on the following groups of poems, and note what 
 light each in a group sheds upon the other : 
 
 («) Youth and Age (Byron). 
 
 The Lesser Celayjdine (Wordsworth). 
 (6) Proud Maisie (Scott). 
 
 The Bridge of Sighs (Hood). 
 {c) To the Skylark (Wordsworth). 
 
 To a Skylark (Shelley). 
 
 [d) Youth and Age (Coleridge). 
 The River of Life (Campbell), 
 
 5. Sir Arthur Helps makes one of the characters in Friends 
 in Council speak wdth approval of " the divine art of skipping " 
 as one that should be exercised by both readers and writers. 
 Set down your own ideas on the subject. 
 
 180
 
 GENERAL QUESTIONS 
 
 1. It has been said that " Poetry sets the hardest lessons to 
 music." Enlarge upon this statement, adding any illustrations 
 that may occur to you. 
 
 2. What would you say to a critic who objected to Keats's 
 sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer because Chap- 
 man's is not a good translation and because it was not Cortez 
 who " stared at the Pacific " ? 
 
 3. Say whethef you think the following lines are prose or 
 verse. Give reasons for your opinion. 
 
 (a) Was this the face that faced so many folUes ? 
 
 (6) Oh — you queens — you queens ; among the Kills and happy 
 
 greenwood of this land of yours, 
 (c) What's become of Waring since he gave us all the slip ? 
 {d) But in this tournament can no man tilt. 
 {e) Moses and the Prophets ! Does the old lady intend to 
 
 marry me ? 
 
 4. Give examples of the various forms of recurrence that are 
 found in literature. 
 
 5. Show, with illustrations, how movement in prose may be 
 accelerated or retarded. 
 
 6. " Literature is the immortality of speech." Say what you 
 think of this as a definition. 
 
 7. Emerson says, " There is no choice of words for him who 
 clearly sees the truth. That provides him with the best word." 
 Discuss this statement. 
 
 8. Comment on the suitability of the following figurative 
 expressions : 
 
 (a) 'Zounds ! I am afraid of this gunpowder Percy, though he be 
 
 dead. 
 {h) A glorious world 
 
 Fresh as a banner bright, unfurl'd 
 
 To music suddenly. 
 
 181
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 (c) Dew-drops are the gems of morning, 
 
 But the tears of mournful eve 1 
 {d) The sweet buds . . . 
 
 Had not yet lost their starry diadems 
 
 Caught from the early sobbing of the morn. 
 
 {e) The woman opened her eyes. The fainting-fit left the rouge 
 like an unnatural island on her yellow cheeks, the lines and 
 wrinkles in her face had become more apparent than ever. 
 
 (/) The rugged castle — I will not undertake to say how many 
 hundreds of years ago then — was abandoned to the centuries 
 of weather which have so defaced the dark apertures in its 
 walls, that the ruin looks as if the rooks and daws had pecked 
 its eyes out. 
 
 9. Comment on the suitability of the verse-forms chosen in 
 Shelley's Epipsychidion, Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 
 Milton's Paradise Lost, Burns's Cottar's Saturday Night. 
 
 10. Discuss the appropriateness of the line-length in the 
 following passages : 
 
 (a) A poor life this if, full of care. 
 
 We have no time to stand and stare. 
 
 W. H. Davies 
 (fc) Very old are we men ; 
 Our dreams are tales 
 Told in dim Eden 
 
 By Eve's nightingales. 
 
 W. De la Mare 
 
 (c) We are puppets, Man in his pride, and Beauty fair in her 
 
 flower ; 
 Do we move ourselves, or are moved by an unseen hand 
 
 at a game 
 That pushes us ofi from the board, and others ever succeed ? 
 
 Tennyson 
 
 (d) Time, you old gipsy man. 
 
 Will you not stay. 
 
 Put up your caravan 
 
 Just for one day ? 
 
 Ralph Hodgson 
 
 II. Write detailed accounts of the following imaginary works : 
 (a) A psychological novel by Shakespeare ; (b) A light comedy 
 by Milton ; (c) A book of lyrics by Edward Gibbon. Make 
 182
 
 GENERAL QUESTIONS 
 
 special reference to the way in which each writer handles the 
 literary form he is supposed to have chosen. 
 
 12. Give an account of an imaginary conversation between 
 (a) Hamlet and Shakespeare ; (6) Satan and Milton. 
 
 13. Quote some notable examples of reticence in literature. 
 
 14. Examine the following passages and comment on their 
 main literary features : 
 
 (a) And through his veins there ran 
 
 A strange oblivious trouble, darkening sense 
 
 Till he knew nothing but a hideous fear 
 
 Which bade him fly. Robert Bridges 
 
 (b) Faster, faster, 
 
 O Circe, Goddess, 
 Let the wild thronging train. 
 The bright procession 
 Of eddying forms. 
 
 Sweep through my soul. 
 
 Matthew Arnold 
 
 (c) I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus. 
 The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool. 
 With open mouth swallowing a tailor's news ; 
 Who, with his shears and measure in his hand. 
 Standing on slippers, which his nimble haste 
 Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet. 
 
 Told of a many thousand war-Uke French, 
 That were embattaled and rank'd in Kent. 
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 (d) Old Yew, which graspest at the stones 
 
 That name the under-lying dead. 
 
 Thy fibres net the dreamless head, 
 
 Thy roots are wrapt about the bones. 
 
 Tennyson 
 (c) For Sorrow, like a heavy hanging bell, 
 
 Once set on ringing with his own weight goes. 
 
 Shakkspearb 
 
 15. The sonnet has been humorously called an " apartment for 
 single gentlemen in verse." Add your own comments on this view. 
 
 16. Comment upon the prose-rhythm of the following extracts : 
 
 (a) To call such a man ' ambitious,' to figure him as the prurient 
 windbag described above, seems to me the poorest solecism. 
 Such a man will say : " Keep your gilt carriages and huzzaing 
 
 183
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 mobs, keep your red-tape clerks, your influentialities, your 
 important businesses. Leave me alone, leave me alone ; there is 
 too much of life in me already ! " Old Samuel Johnson, the greatest 
 soul in England in his day, was not ambitious. ' Corsica Boswell ' 
 flaunted at public shows with printed ribbons round his hat ; 
 but the great old Samuel stayed at home. The world-wide soul 
 wrapt-up in its thoughts, in its sorrows ; — what could paradings, 
 and ribbons in the hat, do for it ? Carlyle 
 
 {b) Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom ; 
 and a great empire and little minds go ill together. If we are 
 conscious of our station, and glow with zeal to fill our places as 
 becomes our situation and ourselves, we ought to auspicate all our 
 public proceedings on America with the old warning of the church, 
 St<rsum corda ! We ought to elevate our minds to the greatness 
 of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By 
 adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have 
 turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire ; and have made 
 the most extensive, and the only honourable conquests, not by 
 destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness, 
 of the human race. Burke 
 
 (c) William denied that he was guilty of temerity. It was, 
 he said, from a sense of duty, and on a cool calculation of what 
 the public interest required, that he was always at the post of 
 danger. The troops which he had commanded had been little 
 used to war, and shrank from a close encounter with the veteran 
 soldiery of France. It was necessary that their leader should 
 show them how battles were to be won. And in truth more than 
 one day which had seemed hopelessly lost was retrieved by the 
 hardihood with which he rallied his broken battalions and cut 
 down the cowards who set the example of flight. Sometimes, 
 however, it seemed that he had a strange pleasure in venturing 
 his person. It was remarked that his spirits were never so high 
 and his manners never so gracious and easy as amidst the tumult 
 and carnage of a battle. Macaulay 
 
 {d) I was this morning surprised with a great knocking at the 
 door, when my landlady's daughter came up to me and told me, 
 that there was a man below desired to speak with me. Upon my 
 asking her who it was, she told me it was a very grave elderly 
 person, but that she did not know his name. I immediately went 
 down to him, and found him to be the coachman of my worthy 
 friend Sir Roger de Coverlcy. He told me that his master came 
 to town last night, and would be glad to take a turn with me in 
 Gray's-inn walks. Addison 
 
 184
 
 GENERAL QUESTIONS 
 
 17. Sir Edward Cook points out that while Perdita calls a 
 violet ' dim,' Milton's epithet is ' glowing.' He asks why. WTiat 
 answer could you give to this question ? 
 
 18. Comment on the length of the vrords in the following 
 passages : 
 
 (a) Then spake King Arthur to Sir Bedivere : 
 " Far other is this battle in the west 
 Whereto we move, than when we strove in youth. 
 And brake the petty kings, and fought v.nth Rome, 
 Or thrust the heathen from the Roman wall, 
 And shook him thro' the north. Ill doom is mine 
 To war against my people and my knights. 
 The king who fights his people fights himself. 
 And they my knights, who loved me once, the stroke 
 That strikes them dead is as my death to me. 
 Yet let us hence, and find or feel a way 
 Thro' this blind maze, which ever since I saw 
 One lying in the dust at Almesbury, 
 Hath folded in the passes of the world." 
 
 Tennyson 
 
 {b) O Prince, O chief of many throned Powr's, 
 That led th' embattled Seraphim to war 
 Under thy conduct, and, in dreadful deeds 
 Fearless, endangered Heav'n's perpetual King, 
 And put to proof His high supremacy — 
 Whether upheld by strength, or chance, or fate — 
 Too well I see and rue the dire event 
 That with sad overthrow and foul defeat 
 Hath lost us Heav'n, and all this mighty host 
 In horrible destruction laid thus low. 
 As far as Gods and Heav'nly Essences 
 Can perish : for the mind and sp'rit remains 
 Invincible, and vigour soon returns. 
 Though all our glory extinct, and happy state 
 Here swallowed up in endless misery. 
 
 Milton 
 
 19. Write an imaginary conversation between Samuel 
 Richardson, Charles Dickens, and Compton Mackenzie on the 
 modern novel. 
 
 20. In Pencraft Sir William Watson protests against " the 
 reposeless journalese in which a bullet invariably shigs ; an 
 aeroplane never forgets to drone ; and a shell can be trusted at 
 
 185
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 all times to scream." Give any similar examples that you have 
 noticed in your own reading. 
 
 2 1 . Say whether you think the following are good descriptions, 
 and specify any merits or weaknesses that you may observe : 
 
 (a) She dropped an envelope upon which she had been making 
 minute financial calculations, and went with an impatient move- 
 ment to fling the window wide and allow the smell of cooking to 
 escape. Her room was on the topmost floor. The wallpaper was 
 patterned and dingy, the ewer had been riveted, the bedspread 
 was tinged with a grey which told of a long career of visits to 
 cheap laundries. Outside there was a vista of chimney-stacks 
 and slate roofs, of sooty walls and telegraph posts. A dejected 
 cat prowled over the nearest roof in the furtive way of his tribe. 
 A dauk tress of ivy, half -killed by the blacks, trailed over the wall 
 of the adjoining yard. The sky, already lowering, was murkied 
 by the smoke-polluted atmosphere. 
 
 " If there were only something nice to look at," thought Anne 
 with a sigh. E. S. Stevens 
 
 {b) The top of the house was worthy of notice. There was a 
 sort of terrace on the roof, with posts and fragments of rotten lines, 
 once intended to dry clothes upon ; and there were two or three 
 tea-chests out there, full of earth, with forgotten plants in them, 
 like old walking-sticks. Whoever chmbed to this observatory, 
 was stunned at first from having knocked his head against the 
 little door in coming out ; and after that, was for the moment 
 choked from having looked, perforce, straight down the kitchen 
 chimney ; but these two stages over, there were things to gaze 
 at from the top of Todgers's, well worth your seeing too. For first 
 and foremost, if the day were bright, you observed upon the house- 
 tops, stretching far away, a long dark path : the shadow of the 
 Monument ; and turning round, the tall original was close beside 
 you, with every hair erect upon his golden head, as if the doings 
 of the city frightened him. Then there were steeples, towers, 
 belfries, shining vanes, and masts of ships : a very forest. Gables, 
 housetops, garret-windows, wilderness upon wilderness. Smoke 
 and noise enough for all the world at once. Dickens 
 
 22. Write critical notes on the following, concentrating upon 
 unity, contrast, literary form, and any special literary devices 
 used : The Pickwick Papers, Newman's Apologia, Browning's 
 The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Si Praxed's Church, Tennyson's 
 Maud, Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, Carlyle's Past and Present, 
 and Shakespeare's Henry V. 
 
 i86
 
 GENERAL QUESTIONS 
 
 23. 'The following speeches were both made by Eugene Wray- 
 burn (in Our Mutual Friend) respecting a third person. Show 
 that the difference of rhythm is appropriate : 
 
 (a) " Yes, regarding my respected father," assented Eugene, 
 settling himself in his arm-chair. " I would rather have ap- 
 proached my respected father by candleUght, as a theme requiring 
 a little artificial briUiancy ; but we wiU take him by twihght, 
 enlivened with a glow of WaUsend." 
 
 (6) " Faith we DO ! " returned Eugene, with great animation. 
 " We may hide behind the bush and beat about it, but we DO. 
 Now my wife is something nearer to my heart, Mortimer, than 
 Tippins is, and I owe her a Uttle more than I owe to TippLns, and 
 I am rather prouder of her than I ever was of Tippins. Therefore, 
 I will fight it out to the last gasp, with her and for her, here in the 
 open field. When I hide her, or strike for her, faint-heartedly, 
 in a hole or a corner, do you, whom I love next best upon earth, 
 tell me what I shall most righteously deserve to be told : — that 
 she would have done well to have turned me over with her foot 
 that night when I lay bleeding to death, and to have spat in my 
 dastard face." 
 
 24. Criticize the following passages, pointing out any note- 
 worthy features in rhythm, recurrence, diction, letter-values, or 
 general efiect : 
 
 (a) And I have felt 
 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 
 Of elevated thoughts ; a sense subhme 
 
 Of something far more deeply interfused. 
 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. 
 
 And the round ocean and the living air. 
 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 
 And rolls through all things. Wordsworth 
 
 {b) There are sorrows, it is true, so great, that to give them 
 some of the ordinary vents is to run a hazard of being over- 
 thrown. These we must rather strengthen ourselves to 
 resist, or bow quietly and drily down, in order to let them pass 
 over us as the traveller does the wind of the desert. But 
 where we feel that tears would relieve us, it is false philosophy 
 to deny ourselves at least that first refreshment ; and it is 
 always false consolation to tell people that because they 
 cannot help a thing, they are not to mind it. The true way 
 
 187
 
 188 
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 is to let them grapple with the unavoidable sorrow, and try 
 to win it into gentleness by a reasonable yielding. There are 
 griefs so gentle in their very nature that it would be worse 
 than false heroism to refuse them a tear. Of this kind are 
 the deaths of infants. Leigh Hunt 
 
 (c) My silks and fine array, 
 
 My smiles and languished air. 
 By Love are driven away ; 
 
 And mournful lean Despair 
 Brings me yew to deck my grave : 
 Such end true lovers have. 
 
 Blake 
 
 [d) For every war, a motive of safety or revenge, of honour or 
 zeal, of right or convenience, may be readily found in the 
 jurisprudence of conquerors. No sooner had Timour re- 
 united to the patrimony of Zagatai the dependent countries 
 of Carizme and Candahar, than he turned his eyes towards 
 the kingdoms of Iran or Persia. From the Oxus to the 
 Tigris, that extensive country was left without a lawful 
 sovereign since the death of Abousaid, the last of the descen- 
 dants of the great Houlacou. Gibbon 
 
 {e) This, then, is to be a story, may it please you, in which 
 jackdaws will wear peacocks' feathers, and awaken the just 
 ridicule of the peacocks ; in which, while every justice is 
 done to the peacocks themselves, the splendour of their 
 plumage, the gorgeousness of their dazzling necks, and the 
 magnificence of their tails, exception will yet be taken to the 
 absurdity of their rickety strut, and the foolish discord of 
 their pert squeaking ; in which lions in love will have their 
 claws pared by sly virgins ; in which rogues will sometimes 
 triumph, and honest folks, let us hope, come by their own ; 
 in which there will be black crape and white favours ; in 
 which there will be tears under orange-flower wreaths, and 
 jokes in mourning-coaches ; in which there will be dinners 
 of herbs with contentment and without, and banquets of 
 stalled oxen where there is care and hatred — ay, and kindness 
 and friendship too, along with the feast. Thackeray 
 
 (/) The accumulated murmur of soft plashing, 
 
 Of waves on rocks dashing and searching the sands. 
 Takes my ear, in the veering 
 Baffled wind as rearing 
 I^pright at the cliff, to the gullies and rifts he stands ; 
 And his conquering surges scour out over the lands ;
 
 GENERAL QUESTIONS 
 
 While again at the foot of the downs 
 He masses his strength to recover the topmost crowns. 
 
 Robert Bridges 
 
 25. Compile a list of the books (to be limited to twelve volumes) 
 that you would like to take with you on an Antarctic expedition. 
 
 26. Dr Jolinson advises us to read the book that we honestl)^ 
 feel a wish and a curiosity to read. Say what you think of this 
 advice. 
 
 27. Imagine that the following poems had been written in 
 prose instead of in verse-form : do you consider that they would 
 have gained or lost by the change ? 
 
 {a) Pope's Essay on Man. 
 {b) Macaulay's Horatiits. 
 
 (c) Mrs Browning's Aurora Leigh. 
 
 [d) Browning's Bishop Blougram's Apology. 
 
 28. Write a comparative study of any two poems by different 
 writers on the same or kindred subjects. 
 
 29. Describe an imaginary interview with one of Shakespeare's 
 villains immediately after the final scene of the play. 
 
 30. Suppose that one of the following works has appeared to- 
 day for the first time ; give a review of it as you think it might 
 be done in one of the daily papers : Pope's Essay on Criticism, 
 Browning's Sordello, Shakespeare's sonnets, Scott's Waverley, 
 Tennyson's Maud. 
 
 189
 
 BOOKS FOR REFERENCE AND 
 FURTHER STUDY 
 
 (A) General Literary Appreciation 
 
 Gayley and Scott. Introduction to the Methods and Materials 
 
 of Literary Criticism (Ginn). 
 Hudson, W. H. An Introduction to the Study of Literature 
 
 (Harrap). 
 MouLTON, R. G. The Modern Study of Literature (Chicago 
 
 University Press). 
 Quiller-Couch, Sir A. On the Art of Reading (Cambridge 
 
 University Press). 
 WiLLMOTT, R. A. The Pleasures of Literature (Sunday 
 
 School Union). 
 Winchester, C. T. Some Principles of Literary Criticism 
 
 (Macmillan) . 
 
 {B) The Appreciation of Poetry 
 
 Brown, Stephen J., S.J. The Realm of Poetry (Harrap). 
 Lamborn, E. a. Greening. The Rudiments of Criticism 
 
 (Oxford University Press). 
 Mackail, J. W. Lectures on Poetry (Longmans). 
 Newbolt, Sir Henry. A New Study of English Poetry 
 
 (Constable) . 
 Omond, T. S. English Meirists (Oxford University Press). 
 Poe, Edgar Allan. Essays and Stories (" Bohn's Popular 
 
 Library," Bell). 
 Raymond, G. L. Poetry as a Representative Art (Putnams). 
 Watts-Dunton, T. Poetry and the Renascence of Wonder 
 
 (Jenkins). 
 190
 
 BOOKS FOR REFERENCE ETC. 
 
 (C) For Particular Authors or Phases 
 
 Bradley, A. C. Oxford Lectures on Poetry (Macmillan). 
 Bridges, Robert, and Stone, W. D. Milton's Prosody 
 
 (Oxford University Press) . 
 Brooke, Stopford A. Studies in Poetry (Duckworth). 
 Chesterton, G. K. Browning (" English Men of Letters " 
 
 series, Macmillan). Charles Dickens (Methuen). 
 CoLViN, Sir Sidney. The Life of John Keats (Macmillan). 
 Cook, Sir Edward. Literary Recreations and More Literary 
 
 Recreations (Macmillan) . 
 Harrison, Frederic. Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and other 
 
 Literary Estimates (Macmillan). 
 Hearn, Lafcadio. Interpretations of Literature (Heine- 
 
 mann) . 
 Lathrop, H. B. The Art of the Novelist (Harrap). 
 Meynell, Alice. Hearts of Controversy (Bmns and 
 
 Oates). 
 Moulton, R. G. a Short Introduction to the Literature of the 
 
 Bible (Heath). The Modern Reader's Bible (Macmillan). 
 
 Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (Oxford University 
 
 Press) . 
 O'Grady, Hardress. Matter, Form, and Style (Murray). 
 
 Reading Aloud and Literary Appreciation (Bell). 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter. Milton (Arnold). Wordsworth 
 
 (Arnold). 
 Tomkinson, W. S. The Teaching of English (Oxford Uni- 
 versity Press). 
 Trevelyan, G. M. The Poetry and Philosophy of George 
 
 Meredith (Constable) . 
 Verrall, a. W. Collected Literary Essays (Cambridge 
 
 University Press). 
 Wyndham, George. Essays in Romantic Literature (Mac- 
 millan). 
 Young, F. and E. Brett. Robert Bridges : A Critical 
 
 Study (Seeker). 
 
 191 
 
 /
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 The " Poetry and Life " series (Harrap). 
 The " Channels of Literature " series (Dent). 
 
 N.B. — A very useful and comprehensive bibliography 1 
 is issued by the English Association : A Refer en cc\ 
 Library — English Language and Literature. (Pamphlet | 
 No. 46.) 
 
 {D) Literary History 
 
 Cruse, Amy. English Literature through the Ages (Harrap). 
 
 Lang, Andrew, History of English Literature (Longmans). 
 
 Long, W. J. History of English Liter attire (Ginn). 
 
 MouLTON, R. G. World Literature (Macmillan). 
 
 Saintsbury, George. A Short History of English Literature 
 (Macmillan) . 
 
 Walker, Hugh. The Literature of the Victorian Era (Cam- 
 bridge University Press). 
 
 192
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abercrombie, Lascelles, 117, 166 
 
 Aberration, 123 
 
 Abruptness, 152, 164, 165 
 
 Absolute ideas, 129 
 
 Accent, 27-8 
 
 Accuracy, 122 
 
 Across the Plains, 75 
 
 Addison, 151, 164, 169, iSo, 184 
 
 iEsop, C6 
 
 iEstheticism, 165 
 
 Alexander' s Feast, 108 
 
 Alice in Wonderland, 47 
 
 Allegory, 66 
 
 Alliteration, 40, 48, 59 
 
 Alpine climbers, 52 
 
 Anachronisms, 122 
 
 Ancient Mariner, The, 146, 154 5 
 
 Andrea del Sarto, 118 
 
 Anthologies, the use of, 1 76 9 
 
 Antistrophe, 109 
 
 Antithesis, 23, 109 
 
 Antony, Mark, 103 
 
 Apollo, 62 
 
 Apologia, Newman's, 25, 1S6 
 
 Appropriate words, 72 
 
 Architecture of sentences, 1 20 1 
 
 of verse, 104 
 Aristophanes, 126 
 Arnold, Matthew, 12, 41, 49, 80, 
 
 116, 144 
 Art, Lectures on, 166 
 Arthur, Morte d' , 85 
 Arthur, The Passing of, 88 9 
 Artificiality, 162 
 Artistic effects, 19-20, 162 
 Arviragus, 174 
 As You Like It, 143 3 
 Aspirate, 89 
 Assertive style, 121 
 
 13 
 
 Assonance, 41, 48, 104, 165 
 Assurance, 32 
 Atmosphere, 144, 154-5 
 Augustans, the, 90 
 Aurora Leigh, 15, 189 
 Austen, Jane, 169 
 Authorship, individual and collec- 
 tive, 160-1 
 Autobiography, Gibbon's, 132 
 Leigh Hunt's, 42 
 
 B 
 
 b, the letter, 88 
 
 Background, 146 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 69, 14S 
 
 Bagehot, 51 
 
 Ballad, 31, 110 2 
 
 Ballad-dance, 30, 112 
 
 Ballade, 107 
 
 Ballantrae, The Master of, 140 
 
 Ballata, 31 
 
 Banal, the, 170 
 
 Barham, R. H., 47, 33 
 
 Bassanio, 132, 140 
 
 Bath, Lord, 165 
 
 Bathos, 82 
 
 Battle, Mrs, 121 
 
 Baudelaire, 164 
 
 Bayliss, Wyke, 118 
 
 Beauty, 166 
 
 Beelzebub, 73 
 
 Beethoven, 124 
 
 Beginnings, 120, 132,138, 147-8 
 
 Belloc, Hilaire, 73, 174 
 
 Bennett, Arnold, 15 
 
 Benson, A. C, 98 n. 
 
 Beowulf, 43, 113, 117, 167 
 
 Isible, 44, 102 
 
 Biglow Papers, The, 47, 52, 61 
 
 193
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Birds, The, J. C. Squire's, 80, 154 
 
 Birrell, Augustine, 15 
 
 Bishop Blougram's Apology, 189 
 
 Blake, William, 68, 83, 112, 188 
 
 Blakeney, Sir Percy, 150 
 
 Blank verse, 48, 96 
 
 Blessed Daniozel, The, 91 
 
 'Bloods,' 133 
 
 Blunden, Edmund, 90 
 
 Borrow, 121, 156 
 
 Brett, G. S., 162 
 
 Brevity, 93 
 
 Brewster, W. T., 131 
 
 Bridges, Robert, 17, 19, 35, 36, 38, 
 
 41. 73. 77. 178, 179. 183, 188-9 
 Brooke, Rupert, 49, 80, 98, 179 
 Brooke, Stopford A., 67, 117, 118 
 Brougham, Lord, 153 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 130, 164 
 Browning, E. B., 100, 107, 189 
 Browning, Robert, 17, 33, 35, 36, 
 
 37, 47, 50, 52, 90, 91, 116, 118, 
 
 131, 180, 186, 189 
 Brunetiere, Ferdinand, 161 
 Brutality in writing, 1G5 
 Brutus, 103 
 Brynhild, 81 
 Buchanan, Robert, 41 
 Bunyan, 66, 151, 163, 164 
 Burke, 51, 52, 53, 54, 151, 156, 184 
 Burns, 168, 182 
 Butler, Samuel, 162 
 Byron, 19, 22, 64, 70, 118, 123, 154, 
 
 168, 180, 182 
 
 C^SAR, Julius, 103, 122, 172 
 Calais church, description of, 23, 65 
 Cambridge, Mr, 165 
 Campbell, 26, 118, 180 
 Canterbury 2' ales. The, 17, 149 
 " Capital difficulty " of prose and 
 
 verse, 83, 97 
 Caricature, 124, 125-6 
 Carlyle, 12, 61, 69, 132, 166, 169, 
 
 179, 183-4, 186 
 Carroll, Lewis, 47, 126, 127 
 
 Carton, Sydney, 150 
 
 Casablanca, 79, 180 
 
 Cassius, 132 
 
 Catalogues, 76-7, 79-So 
 
 Catholicit}' of taste, 165 
 
 Cavalier Times, 17, 50 
 
 ch sound, 88 
 
 Change, 39-52 
 
 Change in Recurrence, 147 
 
 Chanson de Roland, 115 
 
 Chant royal, 107 
 
 Chapman, 86, 181 
 
 Character, 137, 140 
 
 Charles I, 137 
 
 Chaucer, 17, 54, 76, 90, 149 
 
 Chesterfield, Lord, 165 
 
 Chesterton, G. K., 52, 90, 117, 127, 
 
 131 
 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 53, 182 
 Choice of books, 15, 16, i88, 189 
 
 of words, 71-90, 181, 187 
 Chorus, 50 
 Christabel, 36 
 Christmas at Sea, 21, 149 
 Churchill, Winston, 148 
 Cicero, 172 
 Clare, John, 175 
 Claudio, 158 
 
 Clearness in writing, 50, 93 
 Cloister and the Hearth, The, 21, 
 
 25. 132 
 Cloten, 174 
 Cloud, The, 66 
 Clutton-Brock, A.. 98 
 Coherence, 30-1 
 Coleridge, S. T., 36, 38, 53, 72, 81, 
 
 154-5. 172, 180 
 Collins, 48. 53, 87, 108 
 Columbus, 140 
 Colvin, Sir Sidney, 52 
 Communal rejoicings, 30, 10 1 
 
 literature, 10 r, 160 
 Comparative studies, 154-5, 158-9. 
 
 161 
 Concentration, 124, 152 
 Conqueror Worm, The, 125 
 Conscience, literary, 12 
 Consonance, 48-9, 52, 104, 165 
 Contemporary literature, 162 
 
 194
 
 INDEX 
 
 Contrast, 17-26, 73, 124, 129-30, 
 
 165, 186 
 Cook, Sir Edward, 81, 102, 166, 
 
 179. 185 
 Corydon, 76 
 
 Cottar's Saturday Night, The, 182 
 Countess Cathleen, The, 57 
 Couplet, 45 
 Coventry, Mr, 165 
 Cowley, 96 
 Craigenputtock, 156 
 Cublai Can, 95 
 Cuckoo, Wordsworth's, 177 
 Cuddle, 144 
 
 D 
 
 d, the letter, 89 
 
 Dancing, 30-1 
 
 Dante, 118, 122, 131 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 130 
 
 Daudet, 24 
 
 Davies, W. H., 91, 182 
 
 Dead metaphor, 61 
 
 Death, 157-9 
 
 Decius Brutus, 132 
 
 Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 Empire, 132 
 
 Defence ojf Nonsense, A, 127 
 
 Defendant, The, 131 
 
 Defoe, 164 
 
 De la Mare, W., 52, 91, 182 
 
 De Quincey, 37, 96, 102 
 
 Description, 185 
 
 Design, in story, 139 45 
 in verse, 99-100 
 
 Detail, appropriateness of, 121 2 
 
 Deuteronomy, 23 
 
 Development of character, 140 
 of forms, 112, 116 
 
 Dialect, 90 I 
 
 Dickens, 60, 68, 70, 75, 79, 92, 96, i 
 118, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 143,1 
 169, 180, 185 j 
 
 Diction, 71-91, 181, 187 
 
 Difhculty, expression of, 32 
 
 Discord, 130 
 
 Discordant line, 83, 92 | 
 
 14 
 
 Disproportion, 124-9 
 
 Diversity, 130 
 
 Divine Comedy, The, 25 
 
 Doges' Palace, Venice, 123 
 
 Dombey, death of Paul, 125, 180 
 
 " Doom of the North," 50 
 
 Dotheboys Hall, 75 
 
 Drama, 116 
 
 Dramatic lyric, 116 
 
 Dryden, 14, 108 
 
 Dunciad, The, 53 
 
 Durie, Henry, 140 
 
 Dynasts, The, 118 
 
 Eastern use of figurative language 
 
 67, 69, 130, 161 
 Eatanswill Election, 75 
 Ebal, Mount, 23 
 Ebb Tide, The, 149 
 Eccentricities in writing, 152, 156-7 
 Ecclesiastes, 67 
 Ecclesiasticus, 22-3, 31, 70 
 Economy in literature, 124 
 Effects, artistic, 19-20 
 Effort, expression of, 88 
 Eighteenth-century literature, 62, 
 
 162 
 Elegy, the, 109 
 Eliot, George, 127 
 Elizabethans, the, 90, 134 
 Elian go wan, 29 
 
 Emerson, 102, 168, 172, 176, 181 
 Emotion, 96, loi, 136, 162 
 Emphasis, 124, 129 
 Encyclopedia Britannica, The, 119 
 End-rime, 45 8, 53, 104 
 Endings, 132, 138, 147-50 
 Environment in literature, 156, 168 
 Eothen, 51 
 
 Epic, 98, 112-3, 117, 167 
 Epipsychidion, 182 
 Epithet, 114, 156, 184 
 Epode, 109 
 Erewhon, 162 
 
 Eros and Psyche, Bridge i', 77 
 Essay on Criticism, 15, 52, 118 
 
 i95
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Evasive beginning, the, 148 
 Evening, Ode to, CoUins's, 48, 53, 108 
 Exaggeration, 124 
 " Experiencing power," 98 
 
 /, the letter, 87 
 
 Fable, 65 
 
 Faerie Queene, The, 25, 46, 08, 76, 
 
 86, 90, 105, 115, 166 
 Fair Ines, 17 
 Fairy-tales, 39 
 
 Falstaff, 128, 132, 141, 142, 143 
 Favourite epithet, 156 
 Feminine rime, 47 
 Fiction, 139, 150 
 Fidelity, 135 
 
 Figures of speech, 55-70, 165, 181 
 Fine writing and sublimity, 174 
 Fitzgerald, Edward, 67, 69 
 Fixed literature, 160 
 Flat lines in verse, 82, 90 
 Flatness, 82, 124, 129 
 Fleet Street Eclogues, 165 
 Fletcher, John, 152 
 Folklore, 62 
 
 Form in literature, 121, 182, 186 
 Forms, development of, 112, 116 
 Forsaken Merman, The, 49, 116, 144 
 France, Anatole, 66 
 Frederick, Duke, 144-5 
 Frederick the Great, 132 
 Front-de-Boeuf, 37 
 
 g, the letter, 88 
 
 Galloping rhythm, 33 
 
 Gamp, Sairey, 75 
 
 ' Georgian ' poet, the, 165 
 
 Gerizim, Mount, 23 
 
 Getting up on Cold Mornings, 148 
 
 Gibbon, 24, 121, 132, 171, 182, 188 
 
 Gilbert, Sir W. S., 47, 52 
 
 Giotto, 163 
 
 Gladstone, Life of, Morley's, 8i 
 
 196 
 
 Glendower, Owen, 104, 141 
 
 Golden Treasury, Palgrave's, 25, 
 
 177 
 Gondola, In a, 36 
 Gosse, Edmund, 164 
 Gradation, 122 
 Gradgrind, Mr, 75, 125 
 Grandeur, 125 
 Gratiano, 132 
 Gray, 86, 87, no, 127 
 Grecian Urn, Ode on a, 186 
 Greek chorus, 109 
 drama, 140 
 myths, 161 
 Green Linnet, Wordsworth's, 177 
 Grendel, 113 
 Grotesque, the, 124, 131 
 Guiderius, 174 
 Gulliver's Travels, 66 
 Gummidge, Mrs, 126 
 Gutturals, 88, 89 
 Guy Manner ing, "28 
 
 H 
 
 h, the letter, 89 
 
 Hamerton, P. G., 167 
 
 Ha»ilet, 25, 134, 148, 183 
 
 Handy Andy, 132 
 
 Hardy, Thomas, 37, 118, 124 
 
 Harmony in literature, 48, 1 19-31 
 
 Haroun-al-Raschid, 134 
 
 Harrison, Frederic, 53, 84 
 
 Haselden, Percy, 58 
 
 Hawthorne, 164 
 
 Hazlitt, 37, 120, 163 
 
 Head-rime, 40, 45, 104 
 
 Hearn, Lafcadio, 32 n., 131 
 
 Hearts of Controversy, 90, 131 
 
 Hebrew poetry, 43, 67, 104 
 
 Helps, Sir Arthur, i8o 
 
 Henley, W. E., 40, 72, 147 
 
 Henry IV (First Part), 25, 59, 102, 
 
 128, 141, 142 
 Henry V, 186 
 Henry VIII, 151-2, 
 Henry, Prince, 141-3, 150 
 Hercules, 120
 
 INDEX 
 
 Herford, C. H., 82 
 Hero and heroine, 141 
 Heroes and Hero-worship, 6g 
 History of England, Macaulay's, 
 
 132 
 Hodgson, Ralph, 182 
 Holofernes, 40 
 Homer, 75, 77, 134, 167, 171 
 Hood, Robin, no, 112 
 Hood, Thomas, 17, 131, 180 
 Horatian Ode, 108 
 Hor alius, 189 
 Hudson, Professor W. H., 102, 120, 
 
 131, 167 
 Hume, David, 165 
 Humour, 47, 78-9, 125 31, 141 
 Hunt, Leigh, 17, 42, 148, 187-8 
 Hutton, Edward, 173 
 Hymir, 62 
 
 Iambic line, 32, 100, 123 
 Idylls of the King, 1 1 5 
 Uiad, 77 
 
 Imagery, 67-9, 152 
 Imagination, the reader's, 136 
 Impersonal poetry, no 
 In Memoriam, 165 
 Incongruity, 79, 130 
 Individuality in literature, 12G, 
 
 151, 161 
 Inevitable word, the, 71, 162 
 Ingoldsby Legends, The, 47, 52, 79 
 Initial stress, 31 
 Inside of the Cup, The, 148 
 Intellectual Life, The, 167 
 Intolerance in literary judgments, 
 
 170 
 Inversion, 157 
 lolanthe, 47 
 Isaiah, 50, 53, 102 
 Ivanhoe, 37 
 
 j, the letter. 88 
 Jacobs, W. W., 18 
 
 James, Henry, 75, 138, 151 
 
 Jaques, 144 
 
 Jamdyce, Mr, 126 
 
 Jefferies, Richard, 147 
 
 Jenyns, Mr Soame, 165 
 
 Jessica, 146 
 
 Job, Book of, 44, 150 
 
 Jotham's tale, 39, 134 
 
 Journalese, 185 
 
 Judgment, literary, 13, 164-5 
 
 Julius CcBsar, 102, 122, 172 
 
 K 
 
 h, the letter, 88 
 
 Kapiolani, 84 
 
 Katharine, Queen, 151 
 
 Keats, 38, 42, 46, 52, 53, 55, 57, 58, 
 60, 69, 70, 72, 81, 92, 103, 104, 
 147, 157, 159, 177, 181, 1S6 
 
 Key-words, 49 
 
 King Lear, 53, 109 
 
 Kinglake, 51 
 
 Kings, Second Book of, 5 ) 
 
 Kingsley, Charles, 156 
 
 Kipling, 68, 90, 121 
 
 Kirke, E., 46 
 
 Kubla Khan, 17, 95, 135 
 
 /. the letter, 87 
 
 Lady of the Lake, The, 85 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 18, 79, 121, 131, 
 
 138, 153, 163, 180 
 Lamborn, E. A. Greening, 36 
 Lament, Shelley's, 17, 118 
 Lang, Andrew, 149 
 Laocoon, 79, 135 
 Latin language, 161 
 Launcelot, 128 
 Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 33, 
 
 "5 
 Lazarus, 131 
 Lear, Edward, 126 
 Ledwidge, Francis, 73 
 
 197
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Lee, Sir Sidney, 151 
 Leit-motiv, 114 
 Length of book, 120 
 
 of line, 43-4, 83-4, 182 
 
 of parts, 120 
 
 of sentences, 120-1, 132 
 
 of words, 73-4, 185 
 Letter to Maria Gisborne, 79 
 Letters, the use of, 85-91, 187 
 Letters and Social A inis, 102 
 Leuctra, 179 
 
 Light and shade, 122, 124 
 Likenesses, 56 
 Line, discordant, 83 
 
 fiat, 82 
 
 length of, 43-4, 8-4, 182 
 
 sonorous, 80-2 
 Lines to an Indian Air, 74, 120 
 Literature, definition of, 5, 181 
 Literature and life, 172 
 Lockhart, J. G., 17, 117 
 Long. W. J., 43, 113. 117 
 Longinus, 170, 171, 179 
 Lord Ullin's Daughter, 118 
 Lorenzo, 72, 128-9 
 Lotos-Eaters, The, 25, 109, 140, 154 
 Love in the Valley, 20, 149, 175 
 Lover, The Great, 80 
 Lowell, 47, 61, 63, 70 
 Lucas, E. v., 121 
 Lucifer in Starlight, 80 
 Lucretius, 161 
 Lullabies, 86 
 Lycidas, 76, 90, 124 
 Lyric, 106, 117 
 Lyric, the dramatic, 116 
 
 M 
 
 rn, the letter, 86 
 
 Macaulay, 23, 25, 37, 51, 102, 103, 
 
 121. 122, 131, 132. 153, 173, 184, 
 
 189 
 Mackail, J. \V., 99, 167 
 Mackenzie, Coniplon, 185 
 Malaprop, Mrs, 132 
 Man and Superman, 162-3 
 Man, Essay on, 189 
 Mannerisms, 152, 156-7 
 
 198 
 
 Marginalia, Poe's, 52, 60, 102, 131 
 
 Martin Chuzzlewit, 150 
 
 Marvell, 22, 55, 108 
 
 Masculine rime, 47 
 
 Masefield, 52, 60, 90, 97, 154, 172 
 
 Master of Ballantrae, The, 140 
 
 Materials, the use of literary, 123-4 
 
 Maud, 150, 186, 189 
 
 Measure for Measure, 158 
 
 Mediaeval literature, 162 
 
 Meg Merrilies, 29, 31 
 
 Meldon, J. J., 132 
 
 Melody, verbal, 14, 48, 83 
 
 Merchant of Venice, The, 53, 128, 
 
 150 
 Mercurj^ 61, 120 
 Meredith, George, 20, 35, 38, 80, 
 
 124, 131, 147, 149, 157, 175 
 Metaphor, 59-61 
 
 dead, 61 
 Metre, 31, 44, 151 
 Meynell, Alice, 68, 90, 131 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, A , 64 
 Milton, 18, 21, 22, 42, 48, 49, 53, 
 
 72, 77-8, 80, 82, 90, 98, 114, 1 20, 
 
 122, 124, 131, 132, 156, 161, 179, 
 
 182, 183, 185 
 Milton, Essay on, 25, 102, 131, 132 
 Mind and matter, 166 
 Miriam's song, 30 
 Modern Love, 80 
 Modern Painters, 25, 175 
 Modern Reader's Bible, The, 23, 
 
 43. 50. 53. 103 
 Monosyllables, 73-4, 80 
 Monotony, 42, 51, 129 
 Montague Tigg, 75 
 Montaigne, 164 
 Montgomery, Robert, 121 
 Moore, Sir John, 95 
 Moore, T. Sturge, 38 
 Morley, Lord, 81 
 Morris, William, 81-2 
 Morte d' Arthur, 85 
 Motley, J. L., 149, 156 
 Moulton, R. G., 23, 43. 50, 53, 68, 
 
 102, 103, 112, 116, 149 
 Movement, 27, 119, 137, 139, 181 
 Mulvaney, Private, 130
 
 INDEX 
 
 Musical sandwich, 130 
 Mj'stery, 122 
 Myth-making, 66-7, 153 
 
 Names, proper, 75-9, 92 
 
 Nature, unchanging, 147 
 
 Nell, Little, 143 
 
 New Year's Eve, 79 
 
 Newbolt, Sir Henry, 31, 36, 37, 
 
 102, 117 
 Newcomes, The, 150 
 Newman, J. H., Cardinal, 25, 151, 
 
 153. 163, 171, 186 
 Nightingale, Ode to a, Keats's, 147, 
 
 159. 177 
 Nonsense, 126 
 Nonsense, A Defence of, 127 
 Northern Cobbler, The, 90 
 Northern myths, 161 
 Novel, the, 121, 138 9, 162, 185 
 Novum Organum, 119 
 Noyes, Alfred, 35 
 
 O 
 
 Obermann, 164 
 
 Obiter Dicta, 143 
 
 Objective poetry, no 
 
 Obscurity, 124 
 
 Ode, 108 
 
 Odin, 81, 161 
 
 O'Grady, Hardrcss, 13, 37, 102 
 
 Old Curiosity Shop, The, 150 
 
 Oldbuck, Mr, 103 
 
 Omar Khayyam, Rubciiydt of, 67, 69 
 
 On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, 
 
 80 
 Oona, 57 
 
 Orczy, Baroness, 1 1 9 
 Oniament, 56, 119, 165 
 Osborne, George, 125 
 Cuv Mut.,al Friend, 150, 187 
 ' Overflow, '114 
 Owd Roa, 90 
 Ozymavdias, 25 
 
 p. the letter, 88 
 Palgrave, F. T., 25, 177 
 Palmyra, the fall of, 24 
 Paradise Lost, 18, 21, 25, 42, 48, 53, 
 
 69. 78, 90, 114. 118, 120, 125, 132, 
 
 182 
 Paradox of literature, 129 
 Parallelism, 43 4, 48, 104-5 
 Parody, 47, 153-4 
 Passing of Arthur, The, 88 
 Past and Present, 186 
 Pater, 102, 156, 165 
 " Pathetic fallacy," the, 65 
 Pathos, 125, 131 
 Patmore, 82 
 
 Pattern in writing,''43, 99 
 Paul, St, 131 
 Pause, the, 27, 28 
 Payne, E. J., 12, 156 
 Pecksniff, Mr, 126 
 Pencraft, 185 
 Penguin Island, 66 
 Pentameter, 100 
 Perdita, 185 
 Personal poetry, no 
 Personality, 151-67 
 Personification, 61-8 
 Peter Bell, 154-5 
 Pickivick Papers, 25, 186 
 Pictures in words, 56, 94 
 Pilgrimes, Purchas's, 95 
 Pilgrim's Progress, The, 66 
 Pindaric ode, 108 
 Pippa Passes, 25 
 Pleasures of Literature, The, 15, 167 
 Plot. 134. 137. 139 
 Plot-diagrams, 142, 145 
 Plutarch, 179 
 
 Poe, 39, 49. 52. 60, 102, 125, 131 
 Poetic Principle, The, 102 
 Poetic prose, 96, 102 
 Poetry and life, 105 
 Poetry, nature of, 95, 96, 99, loi, 
 i8i 
 subjects of, 96, 97 
 Polysyllables, 73-4 
 Polysyllabic rime, 47 
 
 199
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Pool of Siloam, the, 124 
 
 Pope, 15, 16, 45, 52, 53, 63, 69, 96, 
 
 103, 118, 123, 164, 189 
 Poppy, The, Francis Thompson's, 
 
 87 
 Portia, 140, 150 
 Poses in literature, 62, 165 
 Poyser, Mrs, 132 
 Princess, The, 118 
 Prometheus Unbound, 66 
 Proper names, 75-9, 92 
 Proportion, 1 19-31, 135 
 Prose, nature of, 94, 96, loi 
 Prose, poetic, 96, 102 
 Prose-rhythm, 29, 30, 96, 183, 186 
 Prose and verse, 96, 100, 101, 181, 
 
 189 
 Prose Ballads, Daudet's, 24 
 Prothalamion, 50 
 Proverbs, Book of, 68 
 Psalms, Book of, 25, 43, 44, 53 
 Puckle, James, 60 
 Purchas, Samuel, 95 
 
 Q 
 
 QUILLER-COUCH, SiR A. T., 83, 97 
 Quilp, 126, 150 
 
 R 
 
 r, the letter, 87 
 
 Rabelais, 126 
 
 Racial personality, 161 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 1 34 
 
 Raven, The, 49 
 
 Raymond, G. L., 36, 68, 91 
 
 Reade, Charles, 21, 25, 121 
 
 Reader's part not passive, 12, 136 
 
 Realism, 97, 139, 155, 172 
 
 Recurrence, 31, 39-54, 124, 181, 187 
 
 Recurrence, Change in, 147 
 
 Refrain, 50 
 
 Regularity of rhythm, 123 
 
 Rejected Addresses, 78 
 
 Relative values, 129 
 
 Rembrandt, 19-20, 135 
 
 200 
 
 Remus, Uncle, 66, 67 
 Renaissance, 162 
 Repetition, 39-54, 104, 127 
 
 of vowels, 41-2 
 
 of words, 49, 104 
 Rereading, 169 
 Restraint, 125, 179 
 Reticence, 125, 183 
 Rhetoric, 30, 31 
 
 Rhythm, 27-38, 96, 104, iii, 123, 
 151. 165, 183, 186-7 
 
 in prose, 29, 30, 96, 183, 186 
 
 in verse, 30-6, 96 
 Rhythmic changes, 33-4 
 Richardson, Samuel, 185 
 Rigaud, Monsieur, 126 
 Rime-pattern, 45-6, 107 
 Rimes, alternate, 45 
 
 end, 45-7.52. 53. 104. "4 
 
 feminine, 47 
 
 head, 40, 104 
 
 masculine, 47 
 
 polysjdlabic, 47 
 
 selection of, 46 
 
 ugly, 46-7 
 Riming couplet, the, 45 
 Rise of the Dutch Republic, The. 149 
 Robin Goodfellow, 64 
 Robin Hood, no, 112 
 Romance, 115 
 Romola, 25 
 Rondeau, 107 
 Rossetti, 70, 91 
 Rules in writing, 100, 171 
 Ruskin, 15, 23, 52, 53, 54, 65, 72, 
 90,91,96, 102, 123, 150, 166, 168, 
 175 
 
 5. the letter, 85 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, 1 1 
 
 Samson, 179 
 ; Sandford, Egbert, 84 
 I Santo Tomks, 1 73 
 I Sartor Resartus, 69, 156 
 I Satan, 73, 97. 183 
 i Satire, 66, 126, 127
 
 INDEX 
 
 Savonarola, 25 
 
 Sawyer, Tom, 132 
 
 Scholar Gipsy, The, 105 
 
 Schoolmen, the, 162 
 
 Schubert, 135 
 
 Scott, 29, 33-^, 37, 46, 85, 92. 103. 
 
 Ill, 115, 119. 134, 156, 157, 180, 
 
 189 
 Scott, Life of, Lockhart's, 17, 117 
 Scrooge, 79 
 Selection, 122, 125, 138 
 Self -revelation in literature, 152-4 
 Senior, Duke, 144-5 
 Sentence-length, 120-1, 132 
 Sesame and Lilies, 15, 90 
 Settmg. 133-50 
 
 Seventeenth-century literature, 162 
 Shakespeare, 37, 40, 42, 59, 69, 72, 
 
 8x, 91, 102, 122, 134, 143, 148, 
 
 151-2, 156, 162, 163, 172, 174, 
 
 180, 182, 183, 186, 189 
 Sharp, Becky, 150 
 Shaw, G. B., 112, 162-3 
 Shelley, 15, 17. 24, 25, 32^., 33, 49, 
 
 66, 67, 69, 71, 74, 79, 84, 103, 
 
 117, 118, 120, 146, 152, 155, 180, 
 
 182 
 Shelley, Essay on, Thompson's, 68 
 Shepherd' s Calendar, The, 45, 144—5 
 Shirley, James, 92 
 Short line, 83, 84, 91 
 sentence, 120 
 story, 121 
 Shylock, 79 
 Sibilants, 85, 89 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 133 
 Sigurd the Volsimg, 81 
 Siloam, the Pool of, 124 
 Simile, 56-9 
 Simon Lee, 136 
 Simplicity, 124 
 Sincerity, 163, 164 
 " Skipping, the art of," 180 
 Skylark, poems on the, 33, 84, 155 
 Smith, James and Horace, 78 
 Smith, Nowell, 98 
 Sohrab and Rustum, 149 
 Somervell, David, 177, 179 
 Songs before Sunrise, 41 
 
 Songs of Innocence, 112 
 
 Sonnet, the, 60, loi, 107, 183 
 
 Sonorous line, 77, 80-2, 90, 92 
 
 Sordello, 189 
 
 Sound-v/riting, 85-91 
 
 Southey, 95, 103 
 
 Spain, The Cities of, 173 
 
 Speech, beaut}'' of, 28 
 
 Speech, figures of, 55-70 
 
 Speech-rhythm, 28, 31 
 
 Speech on American Taxation, 51 
 
 Speed in literature, 33, 69, 87-8 
 
 Spens, Sir Patrick, no, 118 
 
 Spenser, 45, 50, 68, 76, 91, 115, 144, 
 
 146, 166 
 Spirit, 166 
 
 Spirit of Man, Bridges', 17S-9 
 Squire, J. C, 79, 80, 154 
 Stage-play, 116 
 Standards of judgment, 164-5 
 Stanza-form, 46, 105, 117 
 Stanzas written in Dejection near 
 
 Naples, 71, 146 
 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 52 
 Sterling, Life of, 132, 166 
 Stevens, E. S., 186 
 Stevenson, R.A.M., 119 
 Stevenson, R. L., 19, 21, 34, 37, 
 
 52, 75, 133, 149, 163 
 Stones of Venice, The, 25 
 Story-telling, 112, 133-50, l6o 
 Story-writing, 121 
 Stress, 27-34, 48, 50, 114 
 Strophe, 109 
 Style, 151-68 
 Subject-matter, 171 
 Subjective poetry, no 
 Sublime, the, 169-80 
 Surprise, the power of, 58, 73, 
 
 172 
 Swift, 126 
 Swinburne, 37, 41, 46, 81 
 
 Tale of Two Cities, A, 25 
 Talisman, The, 25, 69 
 
 201
 
 TRAINING IN LITERARY APPRECIATION 
 
 Tapley, Mark, 58, 75 
 Tarrypin, Brer, 67 
 Taste, literary, 13 
 Tate and Brady, 44 
 Taylor, Jeremy, 77, 156 
 Technique, literary. 14 
 Tempest, The, 148, 150 
 Tennyson, 25, 34, 37, 46, 49, 64, 73, 
 
 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 90, 92, 109, 
 
 115, 118, 124, 146, 157, 165, 179, 
 
 182, 183, 185, 186. 189 
 Terminal stress, 32 
 Thackeray, 75, 92, 149. 188 
 Thenot, 144 
 Thompson, Francis, 49, 60, 63, 68, 
 
 87, 90, 92 
 Thyrsis, 53, 76 
 Tigg, Montague, 75 
 Titania, 64 
 
 Tolerance in judgment, 170 
 Tolstoy, 121 
 
 Tomkinson, W. S., 15, 37 
 Toots, Mr, 125 
 Touchstone, 132, 144-5 
 Traditional literature, 160 
 Tramp Abroad, A, 36 
 Trevelyan, G. M., 131, 149 
 Tricks of the Trade, 79 
 Triolet, 107 
 Triple measure, 33 
 Tristram of Lyonesse, 81 
 Trochaic line, 32 
 Tropes, 56, 67 
 Tulliver, Mr, 13 
 Twain, Mark, 36 
 Twelfth Night, 149, 150 
 
 U 
 
 Ugly rimes, 4C-7 
 
 Ulalume, Poe's, 49 
 
 Ulrica, 37 
 
 Uncle Remus, 66, 67 
 
 Uncouthness, 164, 165 
 
 Unfinished Symphony, 135 
 
 Uniformity, 123 
 
 Unity, 17-25, 129, 130, 186 
 
 202 
 
 Universal, the, 158, 162 
 Unusual words, 90, 92 
 
 Vagueness, 124 
 Vatiity Fair, 149, 179 
 Vaughan, Richard, 58 
 Venice, 123 
 Verbal harmony, 48, 53 
 
 jugglery, 165 
 Vers libre, 100, 162, 165 
 Verse, architecture of, 104 
 
 blank, 48, 96 
 
 discipline of, 96 
 
 elements of, 96 
 
 forms of, 104-18, 165, 182 
 
 rhythm of, 30-6, 9O 
 Victorians, the, 165 
 Villains in fiction, 141 
 Virgil, 73, 76 
 Vocabulary, 90, 130 
 Voltaire, 164 
 Vowel-music, 42, 52 
 Vowels, long and short, 80 
 
 \V 
 
 Wagner, i 14 
 Walker, Hugh, Si 
 \\'alpole, Horace, 165 
 Waterloo, 125, 179 
 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 46, 117 
 Watson, Sir William, 37, 92, 130, 
 
 185 
 Waverley, 120, 189 
 Waverley novels, the, 134, 169 
 Weller, Sam, 132 
 Wells, H.G.. 138-9, 151, 165 
 West Wind, Ode to the, 152 
 Western mind, the, 67, 161 
 White, Blanco, 159 
 White Rose and Red, Buchanan's, 41 
 Whithcd, W., 165 
 Whitman, Walt, 123 
 Wilde, Oscar, 40 
 Williams, Sir Charles, 165 
 Willmott, R. A., 15, 26, 93, 167
 
 INDEX 
 
 Winter Nightfall, Bridges', 17 
 
 Wisdom, Book of, 57, 68, 69 
 
 Wolfe, Charies, 95, 102 
 
 Woodstock, 120 
 
 Word, the inevitable, 71, 162 
 
 Word-pictures, 56 
 
 Words, economj' in, 124 
 
 length of, 185 
 
 repetition of, 49 
 
 use of, 71-85, 90, 91 
 Wordsworth, 24, 33, 42, 55, 65, 71, 
 81, 82, 90, 92, 97. "8, 136, 154-5, 
 157, 163, 177, 180, 187 
 
 Wrayburn, Eugene, 187 
 Wyndham, George, 37, 69, 117 
 
 Yeats, W. B., 52, 57, 87, 124 
 Young, F. and E. Brett, 27, 36 
 
 Zeus, 161
 
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