incongruity in the joining together of toast and victory, the material and the immaterial, the literal and the metaphorical. There is humor of the same sort in this sentence a little farther on in the same story. "The Judge -who was also his captor-for a moment vaguely regretted that he had not shot him on sight' that morning, but presently dismissed this human weakness as unworthy of the judicial mind." In this the humor comes from the disagreement between regret for not having shot a man and the labeling of that regret as "human weakness." This incongruity is more striking still when we realize that it is so labeled by the judge in his judicial character. In the Century for November, 1913, Frederick Lewis Allen writes: "Suddenly and without warning the netting gave way completely and fell about my ears. Can you imagine a worse predicament than to be pinned under so much wreckage with a mosquito that you personally dislike?" Here the humor is in the final phrase, so much out of agreement with the fact, so inadequate, so obviously an under-statement. 33. There is one heightening of style that has, perhaps, occasioned more analysis and discussion than any other, the heightening that comes from imagery and figure. It is not a matter of any great moment whether a figure is a simile or a metaphor or a transferred epithet, but what is of importance is its character and function as clarifying or intensifying the writer's ideas. These two offices may be combined in one figure, but primarily they are distinct and different. The figure that illustrates a point merely, that helps the reader to understand, that clarifies meaning, bringing it home more surely to the intelligence, has its place naturally in impersonal writing. The figure that expands meaning, that makes it more alive, that brings it home to the senses and the feelings as well as to the intelligence, will be employed in the other sort of writing, the personal, and not in the impersonal. This difference in the character and use of figures runs through all literature, and it would be quite possible to make a shrewd guess at the school of literary art to which any given work belongs on the showing of a sufficient number of figures taken from it. In the list below the figures in the first group are clarifying figures, and those in the second group are intensifying. GROUP I. "Horace's wit and Virgil's state, He did not steal, but emulate." SIR JOHN DENHAM. Syphax, your zeal becomes importunate; And talk at large, but learn to keep it in." 66 JOSEPH ADDISON. They cry, This is a bad summer! as if we ever had any other. The best sun we have is made of Newcastle coal." HORACE Walpole. "And hark, how loud the woods invite you forth in all your gayest trim." JAMES THOMSON. GROUP II. "If yet he can oppose the mighty torrent That bears down Rome, and all her gods, before it." JOSEPH ADDISON. "The old year's dead hands are full of their dead flowers." ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. "Dawn skims the sea with flying feet of gold." ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. "In this moment which, though the violent men that drove the storm could not know it, was the doom of their effort, a spirit that was not wholly human disturbed the nights with Tragedy; the Terror boiled, and men approached the limits where despair and vision meet. It was the last clutch of the great wrestling, the moment of tottering before the throw. The mind of Paris lost hold of the ground; Dalua, the oldest of the gods, the spirit of Celtic madness, took a part in this strain of the western fortunes, vengeance and darkness entered with him also. Twisted into the same whirlwind, all the heroisms and the first victories appeared." Robespierre, by HILAIRE BELLOC.1 The first figure of group one has, no doubt, a touch of intensification. It is more vigorous to steal than to model after or copy, but primarily the figure is a simplification of the meaning. The figure makes that meaning more direct and more unmistakable. The same is true of the second figure. It is simpler, both in form of statement and in mental processes involved in understanding, to say that zeal is importunate than to say that Syphax is importunate in his zeal. This way of being simpler is also a way of being clearer. The figures from Addison and Swinburne in group two may be passed over as being obviously unlike those in group one. The paragraph from Hilaire Belloc is more striking in being so crowded with the figurative. The political action that he is discussing becomes the storm in his imagery, and as a storm we feel its violence the more. In the same way the personification of the abstract, personal, human, and social forces of the hour as a spirit makes them more terrible as they "disturb the night with Tragedy." So it is in the change of these struggling forces to the "last clutch of the great wrestling," and so again 1 By permission of Charles Scribner's Sons. 1 > it is in the introduction of "Dalua, the oldest of the gods." 34. All through this we have figures employed for intensifying the thought. Through them the writing grips our imagination and our senses. We begin to create over again in our own minds that vortex of human passions and battling forces that was the French Revolution, and it becomes, not a fact, but a fascination. This is an effect of style. It is a consequence of the form given to the subject-matter, and not of that subject-matter itself or its arrangement. In a literary way, happy indeed is the writer who has command of such a style as we have in this paragraph and can use it to such effect. 66 It must not be forgotten, however, that it is not always. well to write in a style as highly colored as this. Now and then our thoughts should travel abroad in sober gray. However beautiful a richer dress may be, if it is not suited to the occasion, as a dress of words it is in danger of becoming gush or bombast or "fine writing." 'Fine writing" was not thought to be in bad taste a half-century ago, and there are still persons in their seventies or late sixties who admire it. Speaking for the taste of the present, Ernest Poole in his novel, The Harbor, tells how his hero as a college freshman, doing his best to make a place on the college paper, put all his "descriptive powers to use, until a fat senior editor asked sneeringly, “Freshman, why these flowers?" After that he dropped the flowers out of his style. There is a place for flowers and a place for picture hats, and perhaps a place for shoes that catch the eye a block away, but it is not always wise to be a blaze of color. The observer may so be the more surely led to make discovery that the gold thread is only the cheapest tinsel and the silk but cotton with a gloss. V THE RHYTHM OF PROSE 35. EARNESTNESS, deep feeling, sincerity reveal themselves in more than words. Often I have listened to an impassioned speaker and for the moment have wondered how with such sure swiftness he could master and marshal such telling words into their ranks and orders and keep them going on and on as if at the drum-beat of some supreme call to marching hosts. Somehow under the push of strong emotions, the mind works with more certitude, it more readily puts aside the unrelated fact, the inharmonious symbol, the discordant image, achieving a kind of stride and leaving behind it everything that does not fall into the regularity of that movement. Only yesterday I read of some work that needed to be done quickly somewhere on one of the battle-lines in Europe. The man who was directing the work got some pipers to play their pipes that the workers might work in time with their music, and so they did the work more quickly and did it with more ease and pleasure. There seems to be at once an acceleration of thought and a simplification of its processes in such regularity of movement, and this at a lower level finds its exemplification as a law of human action in the greater efficiency of workmen doing their work to the pulse of music. The rhythms of prose are not easily analyzed. They are not so apparent as in poetry, but they are none the less real. Any writing that pleases must have its breathing places, its pauses, properly ordered, and it must have some |