This ignorance
at least is largely irremediable. We shall never learn the
affinities of beauty, for they lie too deep in nature and too far
back in the mysterious history of man. The amateur, in
consequence, will always grudgingly receive details of method,
which can be stated but never can wholly be explained; nay, on the
principle laid down in Hudibras, that
'Still the less they understand,
The more they admire the sleight-of-hand,'
many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution in the
ardour of their pleasure. I must therefore warn that well-known
character, the general reader, that I am here embarked upon a most
distasteful business: taking down the picture from the wall and
looking on the back; and, like the inquiring child, pulling the
musical cart to pieces.
1. Choice of Words.--The art of literature stands apart from among
its sisters, because the material in which the literary artist
works is the dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strange
freshness and immediacy of address to the public mind, which is
ready prepared to understand it; but hence, on the other, a
singular limitation. The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic
and ductile material, like the modeller's clay; literature alone is
condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words.
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