_ Elegance is
appropriateness. Long and circumlocutory terms are just as elegant in
the mouth of a fashionable preacher as shorter and uglier words in the
mouth of some one else. Hamlet's "Angels and ministers of grace defend
us!" and Chuck Connors's "Wouldn't it bend your Merry Widow?" are
equally elegant.
_Q._ What is force in style? _A._ We may illustrate with a quotation
from Hall Caine's unannounced book: "He drew her to him and kissed her
as men and women have kissed through the aeons, since the first star
hymned to the first moonrise." Now, as a matter of fact, kissing is only
about two thousand years old, and is still unknown to the Chinese, the
native Africans, the Hindus, the Australians, the Indians of South
America, the Polynesians, and the Eskimos; but the sentence is
nevertheless a very forcible one.
XXIX
60 H.P.
For the purpose of getting one's name into the papers, the acquisition
of a high-powered automobile may be recommended to the man who has never
given a monkey dinner; whose son was never married to a show-girl in a
balloon at 2.30 A.
Pages:
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215