containing many epigrams, antitheses, condensed sentences is called pointed. See Bacon's Essays; Burke's Letter to a Noble Lord. When a style is ornamented not only with figures of speech but with other adornments, as epithets, it is called ornate. Examples are Shelley's Ode to Liberty, and Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture. A style overloaded with ornament, embellished with unnecessary flowers of rhetoric, is said to be florid. Parts of Macaulay's Essay on Milton are of this type. Where ornaments are avoided as much as possible, the style is plain. Examples are Cowper's Loss of the Royal George; and Southey's Life of Nelson. PERIODIC, LOOSE, BALANCED. A style is often named according to the type of sentence employed: see pp. 112 sqq. EUPHUISM. This properly means the peculiar style of John Lyly, the writer of Euphues. It is marked by-(1) balanced constructions, (2) alliteration, (3) similes from natural history. "The ant, though she toil in summer, yet in winter she leaveth to travail. The bee, though she delight to suck the fair flower, yet is she at last cloyed with honey. The spider that weaveth the finest thread ceaseth at the last when she hath finished her web. But in the action and study of the mind, Gentlemen, it is far otherwise, for he that tasteth the sweet of learning endureth all the sour of labour. He that seeketh the depth of knowledge, is as it were in a Labyrinth, in the which the farther he goeth, the farther he is from the end: or like the bird in the lime-bush, which, the more she striveth to get out, the faster she sticketh in." "For as the tree ebenus, though it no way be set in a flame, yet it burneth with sweet savours: so my mind, though it could not be fired, for that I thought myself wise, yet was it almost consumed to ashes with pleasant delights and cogitations: insomuch as it fared with me, as it doth with the trees stricken with thunder, which, having the barks sound, are bruised in the body, for finding my outward parts without blemish, looking into my mind, could not see it without blows." MANNERISM. When a writer employs some turn of expression, not because it is the most appropriate, but from the mere force of habit, it is termed mannerism. Macaulay, in his desire for emphasis, is fond of expressions like "Never were principles so loudly professed, and so shamelessly abandoned"; and "No man ever laboured so hard to make himself despicable and ludicrous." Thus Macaulay's immediate subject is to him the most extraordinary; and he sometimes places two subjects of the same kind in the same unique position. Other forms of mannerism are Lyly's natural history similes; Johnson's balanced sentences; De Quincey's personifications; Carlyle's interrogations and apostrophes; Dickens's condensed sentences. B. QUALITIES OF STYLE. 1. Intellectual Qualities. CLEARNESS, PERSPICUITY, LUCIDITY. See ch. IV. Macaulay, Cobbett and Southey are examples of perspicuous writers. This quality is opposed to all vagueness, obscurity, and ambiguity. Swift is at times intentionally obscure. Butler's Analogy is in parts very obscure. See p. 51. Goldsmith and SIMPLICITY, ABSTRUSENESS. Paley are examples of simple style. De Quincey's Essenes, Caesars, Logic of Political Economy, are abstruse. Simple is sometimes used as natural-the opposite of affected, laboured. See examples of laboured style in Macaulay's Essay on Madame D'Arblay. 2. Emotional Qualities. SUBLIMITY. When language is used of such a kind and in such a way as to produce the emotion which grand, elevated, awful objects produce, we have sublimity of style. It is the highest form of strength. Milton's Paradise Lost is full of examples; as "The other Shape If shape it might be called that shape had none Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, For each seemed either-black it stood as Night, And shook a dreadful dart: what seemed his head The Bible has many sublime passages; as "And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." Other examples: De Quincey's Prose Fantasies; Shakespeare's King Lear, III. ii. 1 sqq.; Julius Caesar, 1. iii. 3 sqq.; Wordsworth's Ode to Duty; passages in Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture (e.g. "The Lamp of Memory "). NERVOUS, ENERGETIC. Another variety of strength, not so elevated as the sublime, is designated nervous, energetic, vigorous. The ideas are strongly conceived, and the language is forcible; as in Chatham's speech where occurs the outburst: "If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down my arms-never! never! never!" See also Dr Johnson's Letter to Lord Chesterfield. Other instances will be found in Dryden, Defoe, Cobbett, and Sydney Smith. ANIMATION, VIVACITY, PICTURESQUENESS. Here we find rapid, lively movement, and vivid, graphic description. Macaulay is conspicuously animated and picturesque; e.g. in his History, the Siege of Londonderry, Monmouth's Rebellion, the Trial of the Seven Bishops; the Trial scene in his Essay on Warren Hastings; in his Lays, Horatius at the Bridge. In Carlyle we have the Flight to Varennes, and the Last stand of the Swiss (The French Revolution); the Battle of Dunbar (Cromwell's Letters). Other examples: Scott's Flodden, in Marmion; Deloraine's Ride, and Description of Melrose, in The Lay of the Last Minstrel; the Combat between Fitz-James and Roderick Dhu, in The Lady of the Lake; with other battle and adventure pieces in his novels: Chaucer's descriptions in The Prologue: passages in Cobbett's Rural Rides: the skeleton ship, and the snakes in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner: Gibbon's picture of Constantinople, History, ch. xvII.: Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage," As You Like It, 11. vii. 139 sqq.: Tennyson's Lotos-Eaters, 1 sqq. POMPOUS. Where a loftiness of expression is used which is out of keeping with the subject, the style is said to be pompous, or stilted. Dr Johnson's Rambler contains many pompous essays. The following is supposed to be by a young lady of fashion. "To read has, indeed, never been my business: but, as there are hours of leisure in the most active life, I have passed the superfluities of time, which the diversities of the town left upon my hands, in turning over a large collection of tragedies and romances, which chance threw early in my way; where, amongst other sentiments, common to all authors of this class, I have found almost every page filled with the charms and happiness of a country life; that life to which every statesman in the highest elevation of his prosperity is contriving to retire; that life to which every tragic heroine in some scene or other wishes to have been born, and which is always represented as a certain refuge from folly and anxiety, from passion, and from guilt." The Rambler, No. 46. Gibbon's lofty style sometimes turns pompous. BOMBAST. Words and figures that are inflated and excessively turgid, and that are ludicrously unsuited to the ideas, are said to be bombastic. The following description of a woman in tears is bombast. "I found her on the floor In all the storm of grief, yet beautiful; That were the world on fire, they might have drowned Compare Macaulay on Johnson: "It is clear that Johnson himself did not think in the dialect in which he wrote. The expressions which came first to his tongue were simple, energetic, and picturesque. When he wrote for publication, he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese....' When we were taken up stairs,' says he in one of his letters [from the Hebrides], 'a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie.' This incident is recorded in the Journey as follows: 'Out of one of the couches on which we were to repose started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge."" BATHOS. This means a sudden sinking from the dignified or elevated to the mean or low. Good writers occasionally drop into bathos; as Dryden : "When thus, as I may say, before the use of the loadstone, or the knowledge of the compass, I was sailing in a vast ocean, without other help than the pole-star of the ancients, and the rules of the French stage among the moderns.” PATHOS. Writing that awakens tender feelings possesses the quality of pathos; as David's lamentation: "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" II. Samuel, xviii. 33. Other instances will be found in Goldsmith: The Deserted Village (e.g. 325 sqq.), The Vicar of Wakefield, The Citizen of the World (e.g. No. cxvii.); De Quincey: Joan of Arc; Lamb: The Essays of Elia (e.g. "Dream Children "); Steele: The Tatler, Nos. 5, 114; Scott: The Heart of Midlothian; Thackeray: Esmond (Esmond at his mother's grave); M. Arnold: Requiescat, beginning: "Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! Ah, would that I did too!" HUMOUR. In life, certain objects, incidents and scenes provoke laughter, and the laughter gives us pleasure. Literature which presents ludicrous ideas genially, not satirically, has the quality of humour. It may range from delicate raillery to rollicking fun. Examples are such characters as Shakespeare's Falstaff, Dogberry, Bottom, Lance, Shallow, Sly; Scott's Dominie Sampson, Jonathan Oldbuck, Mause Headrigg, Bailie Nicol Jarvie; and Sterne's Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim. See also Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield (e.g. Moses at the Fair), The Deserted · Village (The Schoolmaster), The Citizen of the World (Beau Tibbs); De Quincey: Murder as one of the Fine Arts; Chaucer : The Prologue; Steele: The Spectator, Nos. 2, 107, 109; Lamb, Sydney Smith, Carlyle. |
