The chief of these is the indispensable law of euphony, which governs the sequence not only of words, but also of phrases.In proportion as a phrase is memorable, the words that compose it become mutually adhesive, losing for a time something of their individual scope, bringing with them, if they be torn away too quickly, some cumbrous fragments of their recent association.That he may avoid this, a sensitive writer is often put to his shifts, and extorts, if he be fortunate, a triumph from the accident of his encumbrance.By a slight stress laid on the difference of usage the unshapeliness may be done away with, and a new grace found where none was sought.Addison and Landor accuse Milton, with reason, of too great a fondness for the pun, yet surely there is something to please the mind, as well as the ear, in the description of the heavenly judgment, That brought into this world a world of woe.
Where words are not fitted with a single hard definition, rigidly observed, all repetition is a kind of delicate punning, bringing slight differences of application into clear relief.The practice has its dangers for the weak-minded lover of ornament, yet even so it may be preferable to the flat stupidity of one identical intention for a word or phrase in twenty several contexts.For the law of incessant change is not so much a counsel of perfection to be held up before the apprentice, as a fundamental condition of all writing whatsoever; if the change be not ordered by art it will order itself in default of art.The same statement can never be repeated even in the same form of words, and it is not the old question that is propounded at the third time of asking.
Repetition, that is to say, is the strongest generator of emphasis known to language.Take the exquisite repetitions in these few lines:-Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear Compels me to disturb your season due;For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.
Here the tenderness of affection returns again to the loved name, and the grief of the mourner repeats the word "dead." But this monotony of sorrow is the least part of the effect, which lies rather in the prominence given by either repetition to the most moving circumstance of all - the youthfulness of the dead poet.
The attention of the discursive intellect, impatient of reiteration, is concentrated on the idea which these repeated and exhausted words throw into relief.Rhetoric is content to borrow force from simpler methods; a good orator will often bring his hammer down, at the end of successive periods, on the same phrase;and the mirthless refrain of a comic song, or the catchword of a buffoon, will raise laughter at last by its brazen importunity.
Some modem writers, admiring the easy power of the device, have indulged themselves with too free a use of it; Matthew Arnold particularly, in his prose essays, falls to crying his text like a hawker, Beating it in upon our weary brains, As tho' it were the burden of a song, clattering upon the iron of the Philistine giant in the effort to bring him to reason.These are the ostentatious violences of a missionary, who would fain save his enemy alive, where a grimmer purpose is glad to employ a more silent weapon and strike but once.
The callousness of a thick-witted auditory lays the need for coarse method on the gentlest soul resolved to stir them.But he whose message is for minds attuned and tempered will beware of needless reiteration, as of the noisiest way of emphasis.Is the same word wanted again, he will examine carefully whether the altered incidence does not justify and require an altered term, which the world is quick to call a synonym.The right dictionary of synonyms would give the context of each variant in the usage of the best authors.To enumerate all the names applied by Milton to the hero of PARADISE LOST, without reference to the passages in which they occur, would be a foolish labour; with such reference, the task is made a sovereign lesson in style.At Hell gates, where he dallies in speech with his leman Sin to gain a passage from the lower World, Satan is "the subtle Fiend," in the garden of Paradise he is "the Tempter" and "the Enemy of Mankind," putting his fraud upon Eve he is the "wily Adder," leading her in full course to the tree he is "the dire Snake," springing to his natural height before the astonished gaze of the cherubs he is "the grisly King." Every fresh designation elaborates his character and history, emphasises the situation, and saves a sentence.So it is with all variable appellations of concrete objects; and even in the stricter and more conventional region of abstract ideas the same law runs.Let a word be changed or repeated, it brings in either case its contribution of emphasis, and must be carefully chosen for the part it is to play, lest it should upset the business of the piece by irrelevant clownage in the midst of high matter, saying more or less than is set down for it in the author's purpose.
The chameleon quality of language may claim yet another illustration.Of origins we know nothing certainly, nor how words came by their meanings in the remote beginning, when speech, like the barnacle-goose of the herbalist, was suspended over an expectant world, ripening on a tree.But this we know, that language in its mature state is fed and fattened on metaphor.
