September 6 — Verbal Magic
J—— was reading me parts of his new book in manuscript to-day, and I objected that it lacked style. “Why, all the successful writers tell me that style is unnecessary,” he said in an injured tone. “D—— says he just writes ahead and pays no attention to it. He says that the laboriousness of Stevenson and Flaubert has ’gone out’ and the public are bored by it. And just see how successful D—— is!”
What was one to say? I merely tried to look convinced and begged him to continue. And yet Emerson said that when the distraught Hamlet cried to the mailed spirit of his father,
“What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon?”
he was so possessed by the verbal magic of the phrase that he could attend no more to the rest of the play.
Perhaps it is some penetrating assonance in that “complete steel”—in those sibilant repetitions of “revisit’st thus the glimpses”—that makes its witchery. Poe carefully analyzed the science of it—which is no science at all, but the inscrutable magic of inspiration. Such lines as
“Came up through the lair of the lion
With love in her luminous eyes”
are built upon that theory of liquid consonants and open vowels, and it has no magic at all, while “To Annie”—which was written without conscious plan—is full of it.
“Her grand family funerals” is instinct with that prickling delight of the magic of words, as is “the wizard rout” of the bodiless airs that blew through her “casement open to the night.”
Tennyson’s famous alliteration,
“The moaning of doves in immemorial elms
And the murmur of innumerable bees”
lacks glamour. One scents the intention.
“Ay! Ay! oh ay!
The wind that blows the brier”
recaptures the elusive charm, because of its wild, unconscious lyrism.
Fancy these absurd, ignorant young writers talking of style having “gone out”! Apparently they suppose it means “fine writing,” in which nothing is more lacking than style. The essence of style, I suppose, is in the inspired, instinctive choice of words which present suddenly to the mind a picture of what the writer is talking about. The whole clou of Hamlet’s phrase is that “glimpses of the moon.” It makes one see the vague, intangible momentariness of the apparition. Sir Thomas Browne’s famous “drums and tramplings of three conquests” gives just that flashing picture of the banners and rolling sounds of those long vanished invasions. And Keats’s
“Casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn”
presents the indescribable to the eye.
There is, of course, that other element of musical quality, and Hamlet’s phrase is delicious for its strange, broken sibilations, but without the picture the alliterations and vowel sounds are but dead things. All the fine, rolling, organ-like sonority of Swinburne’s Hymn to Proserpine would be tedious without the impressions of light and colour that palpitate through the lines. For style I can think of no better modern example than the concluding paragraph in Lafcadio Hearn’s paper on the dragon-fly in the volume called Kotto:
“... then let me hope that the state to which I am destined will not be worse than that of a cicade or of a dragon-fly;—climbing the cryptomerias to clash my tiny cymbals in the sun,—or haunting, with soundless flicker of amethyst and gold, some holy silence of lotus pools.”