The
genius of prose rejects the cheville no less emphatically than the
laws of verse; and the cheville, I should perhaps explain to some
of my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employed
to strike a balance in the sound. Pattern and argument live in
each other; and it is by the brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis
of the second, that we judge the strength and fitness of the first.
Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so to speak, a peg to
plait about, takes up at once two or more elements or two or more
views of the subject in hand; combines, implicates, and contrasts
them; and while, in one sense, he was merely seeking an occasion
for the necessary knot, he will be found, in the other, to have
greatly enriched the meaning, or to have transacted the work of two
sentences in the space of one. In the change from the successive
shallow statements of the old chronicler to the dense and luminous
flow of highly synthetic narrative, there is implied a vast amount
of both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we clearly see,
recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep and stimulating
view of life, and a far keener sense of the generation and affinity
of events. The wit we might imagine to be lost; but it is not so,
for it is just that wit, these perpetual nice contrivances, these
difficulties overcome, this double purpose attained, these two
oranges kept simultaneously dancing in the air, that, consciously
or not, afford the reader his delight.
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