Volume Ii Part 44 (1/2)

Hence literary style is quite different from colloquial style, and far more difficult, because it has to make itself as intelligible as the latter with fewer accessaries. Demosthenes delivered his speeches differently from what we read; he worked them up for reading purposes.-Cicero's speeches ought to be ”demosthenised” with the same object, for at present they contain more of the Roman Forum than we can endure.

111.

CAUTION IN QUOTATION.-Young authors do not know that a good expression or idea only looks well among its peers; that an excellent quotation may spoil whole pages, nay the whole book; for it seems to cry warningly to the reader, ”Mark you, I am the precious stone, and round about me is lead-pale, worthless lead!” Every word, every idea only desires to live in its own company-that is the moral of a choice style.

112.

HOW SHOULD ERRORS BE ENUNCIATED?-We may dispute whether it be more injurious for errors to be enunciated badly or as well as the best truths.

It is certain that in the former case they are doubly harmful to the brain and are less easily removed from it. But, on the other hand, they are not so certain of effect as in the latter case. They are, in fact, less contagious.

113.

LIMITING AND WIDENING.-Homer limited and diminished the horizon of his subject, but allowed individual scenes to expand and blossom out. Later, the tragedians are constantly renewing this process. Each takes his material in ever smaller and smaller fragments than his predecessor did, but each attains a greater wealth of blooms within the narrow hedges of these sequestered garden enclosures.

114.

LITERATURE AND MORALITY MUTUALLY EXPLANATORY.-We can show from Greek literature by what forces the Greek spirit developed, how it entered upon different channels, and where it became enfeebled. All this also depicts to us how Greek morality proceeded, and how all morality will proceed: how it was at first a constraint and displayed cruelty, then became gradually milder; how a pleasure in certain actions, in certain forms and conventions arose, and from this again a propensity for solitary exercise, for solitary possession; how the track becomes crowded and overcrowded with compet.i.tors; how satiety enters in, new objects of struggle and ambition are sought, and forgotten aims are awakened to life; how the drama is repeated, and the spectators become altogether weary of looking on, because the whole gamut seems to have been run through-and then comes a stoppage, an expiration, and the rivulets are lost in the sand. The end, or at any rate _an_ end, has come.

115.

WHAT LANDSCAPES GIVE PERMANENT DELIGHT.-Such and such a landscape has features eminently suited for painting, but I cannot find the formula for it; it remains beyond my grasp as a whole. I notice that all landscapes which please me permanently have a simple geometrical scheme of lines underneath all their complexity. Without such a mathematical substratum no scenery becomes artistically pleasing. Perhaps this rule may be applied symbolically to human beings.

116.

READING ALOUD.-The ability to read aloud involves of necessity the ability to declaim. Everywhere we must apply pale tints, but we must determine the degree of pallor in close relation to the richly and deeply coloured background, that always hovers before our eyes and acts as our guide-in other words, in accordance with the way in which we should _declaim_ the same pa.s.sages. That is why we must be able to declaim.