Chapter 4 THE LURE OF MAGIC WORDS

Beautiful language is the flower of poetry. The magic of diction, of enchanted words transformed into radiant, marvellous sentient things pulsing with life and passion, capture our attention, and deep within us something vibrates in answer to their mastering call.

A writer with perfect felicity of expression voices thoughts and emotions of our own heart that we cannot give utterance to, yet of which we are dimly conscious. These ghostly creatures of our mind, half a memory and half a thing, peep and mutter within us; we try to hold them, but they are illusive as shadows on the wall. From the well-written words there leaps out something that has life and form and comeliness in it, and instantly we recognize an intimate returning from a far country laden with spoil. Words liberate the imprisoned thought that fretted within us and set it free: gloriously free for you and me and all the world to make familiar with.

There are words--spectacular words that print indelibly pleasant pictures on the mind, reveal in a sabre-flash thoughts that burn and things that were hidden. There are words--vivid, striking, portentous words that unfold noble vistas of truth in which happy, emancipated people walk freely in sunlight and song. There are melodious, aromatic words that ring tunefully through corridors of the mind like a carillon of merry bells charming the heart with far-reaching joy. There are strong, fiery, tempestuous words that crash and rattle and reverberate like rolling thunder through your being, and kindle the spirit of man into blazing passion and heroic fervour. There are dull, prosy, somnolent words that baffle like a London fog, envelop the writer's meaning in dense obscurity, and lure the reader's mentality into quagmires of perplexity and doubt.

There are ambrosial, honeyed, ornate words that regale us with fair visions of life, and steep the mind in dreams of romance and intoxicate with amorous delight. There are treacherous, lying words that distil murder in the air as they wing their evil flight. They strike deadly as a keen stiletto, or spit poison like a venomous adder in the grass.

There are discordant words that harrow up the feelings, and there are smooth, velvety, caressing words whose sweet sorcery holds us in their thrall, and that flow on and on harmoniously like the rippling of many waters that never fall out of tune.

Words cannot be measured with the measuring-reed of a man; they are spiritual forces; "they are angels of blessing or cursing. Unuttered we control them, uttered they control us." A man may have much wisdom packed into his capacious mind, but to unfold it attractively so that it glitters in the public eye and arrests attention is where the master art of handling words comes in.

One secret of successful writing is to express your thoughts in as few words as possible. Be frugal in your expenditure of words as a miser over the outlay of his hoarded gold. Write clearly, tersely, compactly, for words, like coins of the realm, are most esteemed when they contain large value in little space. The more briefly a thing is said, the more brilliantly it is put. The rarest of all qualities in a writer is--measure, saying exactly as much as you mean to say and not a word more or less. If a picture is complete, everything added is something taken away.

The "command of language" is often a snare of the devil into which men fall and do themselves grievous hurt. A redundancy of flowery words and empty fluency of speech confuse the thought and confound the meaning; skip half the telling and you know more of the tale. Oh the dreariness of some solid reading I have done in my time!--very learned and logical dissertations, but dulness crowned it all; even the dry bones of scientific matter clogged with technicalities can be made to live by a touch of style. Cartloads of words rumbling along the rutty road of argument slowly to their destination are not half so forceful as an apt image which flies straight to the point on wings of inspiration, and gets there first.

No subject is uninteresting if discoursed with an engaging pen, for words throw colour-magic on things that are common-place and give charm to them. I have watched Italian sunlight playing on the crumbling plaster walls of a peasant's cottage on the Tuscan hills, drenching them in opal and rose-carmine splendours, changing them into the image of a fairy palace. Words cast sunlight on commonplace, familiar things, flushing them with a radiance all their own, and so awaking our mind to see new beauties, or old beauties made manifest in a new light which had been staled by the lethargy of custom. Miss Mitford's village was an ordinary Berkshire village mute in the annals of English history, but it was surprised into fame by the romantic pen of its lady historian. A splendid accident of literary achievement adorned it with immortality, for it unfolds vividly before our wondering eyes the beauty of petty things and plain people in village life. The world owes to her genial pen a debt of gratitude; for it has won our sympathies, and in reading her book we can read our own village with interest instead of boredom, and see for ourselves the beauty and pathos and comedy of common people and homely things around us.

Art is the gift of God to man. It is impossible to buy or barter for the possession of it. You may cultivate, improve, perfect the indwelling talent, but the Divine seed is sown mysteriously in the life of the child when brought to birth. In whom the secret power lies dormant none know until the appointed hour reveals its budding graces. Inscrutable is the Divine favour; none can tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth. It is not inherited like gold or lands; it is not an entailed honour which accompanies the family title. Genius seldom, like an heirloom, passes from sire to son in direct succession.

A man may possess the advantages that education, training, culture give, yet all these excellent acquirements combined cannot manufacture an artist. It needs the live coal taken from off the altar to kindle the sacred flame which illumines the artist's soul.

The painter's art is subject to this very mysterious law. Philip Gilbert Hamerton describes the working of the artistic spirit in man. He says: "Painting is a pursuit in which thought, scholarship, information, go for little; whereas a strange, unaccountable talent working in obscure ways achieves the only results worth having. Here is a field in which neither birth nor condition is of any use, and wealth itself of exceeding little; here faculty alone avails, and a kind of faculty so subtle and peculiar, so difficult to estimate before years have been spent in developing it, or wasted in the vain attempt to develop where it does not exist."

There are pictures you and I dearly love, and they are priceless treasures in the market; yet there is no deep thought or display of learning in them to win our admiration. They violate facts of history, they outrage the grammar of academic art, and even their drawing may be inaccurate. Why, then, are such works cherished and treasured? Because, with all their faults, they have power, they have feeling; they speak to the heart. The men who painted them were unlearned and ignorant, but they were artists to the finger-tips. There is a spiritual something breathing beneath the surface of the true painter's work which leaps to the eye and draws upon us and bestirs our emotions. Other pictures--laboured, scholastic, monumental, they leave us cold and passionless, and we pass them by on the other side.

A good architect also is to the manner born. The principles of proportion in designing a building are difficult to adjust to give pleasure to the eye. Now, the sense of proportion is a gift which some men possess and others lack; although they are architects by profession, they are amateurs in construction. Without that subtle sense of proportion a man blunders through his designs, and puts no feeling of beauty or joy in the finished structure which is the work of his hands. Ruskin says: "It is just as rational an attempt to teach a young architect how to proportion truly and well by calculating for him the proportions of fine works as it would be to teach him to compare melodies by calculating the mathematical relations of the notes in Beethoven's 'Adelaide' or Mozart's 'Requiem.' The man who has eye and intellect will invent beautiful proportions, and cannot help it; but he can no more tell us how to do it than Wordsworth could tell us how to write a sonnet, or than Scott could have told us how to plan a romance."

What the faculty of feeling is to the artist, what the sense of proportion is to the architect, the gift of style is to the writer. Style is the witchery of words; style is clothing thought in captivating language. Style is the setting of the gem. The gem may be rare, but it needs the aid of the goldsmith's art to make the most of it. It is the skilful setting that holds up the sparkling gem to our admiration. Style is everything in writing; it makes the thoughts sparkle. Niceties of style you cannot explain by rule-of-three, nor dissect its individuality by the drastic deed of vivisection; you cannot slash the heart out of it with a critickin's reckless knife. You can unravel a piece of rare old Flemish tapestry, and destroy the beautiful design and harmonious colouring of it. In fact, you can reduce the tapestry to a heap of valueless threads of worsted fit only for burning; but style in literature you cannot pick to pieces. You cannot find the master-thread on which the secret of the pattern runs, and which reveals the cunning of the workman's craft. By some mysterious process the writer weaves words together that the chambers of our imagination may be hung with tapestries rare and pleasant to behold. No explanation of the gift of penmanship is possible. Moulding words into forms of beauty is not an achievement: it is a gift of the gods, and no handbook of literature, however diligently pursued, can turn an artisan into an artist cunning in gold-minted phrases.

When Castiglione sent the manuscript of his book, "The Perfect Courtier," to Vittoria Colonna for her approval, she replied in a flattering letter thanking the author, saying: "The subject is new and beautiful, but the excellence of the style is such that, with a sweetness never before felt, it leads us up a most pleasant and fertile slope, which we gradually ascend without perceiving that we are no longer on the level ground from which we started; and the way is so well cultivated and adorned that we scarce can tell whether Art or Nature has done most to make it fair."

It is expression that counts, and the writer who expresses himself simply, vividly, concisely, boldly, and plays upon our heart-strings at pleasure, is naturally a "gifted" man. He not only sees in clear, full vision himself, but he brings his vision home to our cloudy brains and makes us see clearly; that is the wonder of it. It needs all the art and magic and persuasion of language to accomplish this difficult task. We see the subject presented as a picture when he writes with a graphic pen; we feel poignantly when his sharp and polished periods pierce like a rapier our understanding; we are fascinated when his impassioned eloquence flows, glittering like running water in the sunlight, dazzling our bewildered brains. And when he scores by his native wit and writes in his trenchant, racy mother-tongue there is a smile in the stalls and loud laughter in the pit.

How mysteriously beauty steals into language and warms up the radiant face of poetry with glowing vitality. There is no beauty in stale prosaic sentences like "Trespassers will be prosecuted" or "Rubbish may be shot here," because they say exactly and completely all that they have to say and nothing more can be squeezed out of them. There is beauty in a sentence like "The bright day is done. And we are for the night," or "He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass," because in them, although they seem quite simple, the poet is trying to say infinitely more than he can pack into words. It is the effort to do something beyond the power of words; it is the effort to investigate the alluring Infinite with a mind closely fettered within the cramped and narrow finite that can only stretch forth a hand here and there between prison bars and touch the azure of infinitude which is the dreamland of the soul; it is this reaching out that brings beauty into language: it enflames the imagination; it ruffles the emotions; unutterable thoughts linger on the lips and fail to break away. There is a greatness in these winged words feathered with beauty because they mean a thousand times more than speaks on the surface.

When I was young the magic of words took possession of my virgin mind. The first master of language that I served under was John Ruskin. The aim of good writing is to communicate feeling; Ruskin did this intensely. The indefinable richness and power of words as they flowed from his pen, the musical and measured cadence of his prose, and the limpid clearness of his thoughts when cast on paper, placed an hypnotic spell upon me. When reading one of his books, I dwelt in dreamland. Another reading that I enjoyed with avidity in the seventies and eighties of the last century was the long literary leaders, never too long for me, in the Daily Telegraph. The best literary talent of the day wrote them. Many of them I cut out and placed in my scrap-book; alas! to be buried in decent sepulchre, for I never see them now. Lord Burnham, the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, put himself into these leaders, although other pens wrote them. They were his special hobby, and grew under his inspiration. His biographer tells us: "He had the rhetorical sense strongly developed. He liked full-blooded writing, and had a tenderness for big words and big adjectives, well-matched and in pairs. He revelled in the warmth and colour of certain words, and the more resonant they were, the better he liked them." Words carry not only meaning, but atmosphere with them. Sometimes a single word well chosen and well placed in a sentence gives feeling, and lights it up with a glow of beauty. J. A. Symonds says: "The right word used in the right place constitutes the perfection of style." In my youth a literary friend was pruning a crude essay I had written; he paused in his reading on the word "fallacious," and he said: "That's a good word and well chosen; it's the right word." It was a revelation to me at the time that one word was better than another if they both meant the same thing. On thinking it over, I saw that no two words do mean exactly the same thing, and that there is only one right word in a hundred to express exactly your meaning and to give life to it. The other ninety-and-nine words are but poor relations--nay! they are all dead corpses.

Perhaps you remember Millais' wonderfully popular picture called "Cinderella." A beautiful healthy English child, with deep dreamy eyes and long wavy golden hair sits on a stool by the kitchen fire holding in her hand a birch broom emblem of her kitchen toil. It is a fascinating picture. At home I look on a coloured print of it nearly every day of the week. The most brilliant thing on the canvas is the patch of scarlet in the dainty cap the child wears. That single dab of red seems to concentrate in itself the whole colour-scheme of the picture. It is the keynote. Now a single word in a sentence sometimes gives a startling effect. It strikes a strong, clear, ringing note which keys the writer's passing mood, fascinates us with its vividness, and sticks in the memory ever after. It is a colour-patch in literary art which dominates the picture and arrests attention, as in Shakespeare's

"Every yesterday hath lighted fools

The way to dusty death!"

Or,

"The primrose path to the eternal bonfire."

Or Pope's

"Quick effluvia darting through the brain

Die of a rose in aromatic pain."

Also

"Cease, fond Nature, cease thy strife,

And let me languish into life."

And Gray's inimitable couplet:

"There pipes the song-thrush, and the skylark there

Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air."

It is the height of literary skill to gather up your thought into a single word and fling it flaming on canvas. It is more convincing than a long chapter of dull argument which drugs the senses. Tennyson knew the magic of a single epithet in the thought scheme of the moment when he sang: "All the charm of all the muses often flowering in a lonely word." It is not as easily done as eating hot cakes for tea, for it is not the first word that comes sailing into a man's head that is the right word. "The comely phrase, the well-born word," is a prince of high degree, and you may wait in his anteroom days before an audience is granted. The elect word does not sit on the tip of the tongue and drop into its place at call. You may search diligently and not find it, and presently of its own free will it comes to you, a happy thought flashed from the void where whispering spirits dwell. Gray's Elegy is the most perfect poem in the English language. It was not thrown together carelessly in an idle hour one sleepy summer afternoon. Every word and every line of it cost thought, was written and rewritten, and patiently polished over again. For eight years the author held the poem between the hammer and the anvil, beating it into shape before he passed it into print. He damaged reams of paper developing a fair copy of those immortal verses.