being a king, for those who shall be kings; then the true ideal of the state will become a possibility, but not otherwise. And if the life of Beatific Vision be indeed possible, if philosophy really "concludes in an ecstasy," affording full fruition to the entire nature of man; then, for certain elect souls at least, a mode of life will have been discovered more desirable than to be a king. By love or fear you might induce such persons to forego their privilege; to take upon them the distasteful task of governing other men, or even of leading them to victory in battle. But, by the very conditions of its tenure, their dominion would be wholly a ministry to others; they would have taken upon them "the form of a servant "; they would be reigning for the well-being of others rather than their own. The true king, the righteous king, would be Saint Lewis, exiling himself from the better land and its perfected company —so real a thing to him, definite and real as the pictured scenes of his psalter—to take part in or to arbitrate men's quarrels, about the transitory appearances of things. In a lower degree (lower, in proportion as the highest Platonic dream is lower than any Christian vision) the true king would be Marcus Aurelius, drawn from the meditation of books, to be the ruler of the Roman people in peace and, still more, in war. PATER: Marius the Epicurean, Chapter xix.

224. Here looms the danger in the pursuit of elegance, the danger of obscurity and pedantry. To insist that one's reader shall ponder one's words is an attitude of greater serenity than is supportable except by real eminence. Moreover, it brings a temptation to debase elegance with preciosity. So soon as the reader feels his attention called to the choiceness of the phrase, he has a right to revolt; for this is making style an end in itself. The other affectation that is supposed to arise from the pursuit of elegance is the pompous, the inflated, that cutting of clothes too large for the thought

which is called bombast. But pedantry, preciosity, bombast, are false elegance. They all arise from thinking of the phrase apart from the meaning. As elegance is that delicacy of aptness which arises from good taste in style and is pursued properly toward fine taste, so this false elegance comes from false taste. False taste is inconsistent with the right view of elegance.

225. These dangers are for most men very slight, not comparable with the danger of random looseness and vulgarity. Manuals of rhetoric are sometimes condemned without discrimination as leading through their inculcation of elegance to affectation; and doubtless some of them, for instance the lectures of Dr. Blair, lay too much stress upon the conservative quality of good style. The eighteenth century, again, is often summarily accused of forfeiting by a sort of academic repression all force of natural directness. But the rhetoricians and the eighteenth century have much to answer. It remains true that for most men the study of style necessitates repression and thrives upon choiceness. Impatience of restraint, unwillingness to study, is never the way to begin. That elegance is not all does not dispense any one from learning how far it goes. As for the eighteenth century, the strictures apply only to the narrow view that saw elegance only in certain conventions, and they apply very slightly to eighteenth-century prose. Moreover the prose of Addison, which is admired no less than in his own day, prevails almost entirely by elegance. Swift and Steele have more force, but are none the less obviously inferior. It was once the fashion to smile at Dr. Johnson's prose as pompous and pedantic. So it is sometimes, and is thereby the less elegant; but even our present pre

occupation with emotional directness has not prevented us from recognizing as a permanent quality what Dr. Johnson pursued as his ideal.

We were now treading that illustrious island which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind. from all local emotion would be impossible if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and from my friends be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona. - JOHNSON: A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, Icolmkill.

The man who wrote that knew more about style than his detractors; and his famous praise of Addison, —

He who would acquire a style familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, should give his days and nights to the study of Addison.

remains good counsel for the study of style.

c. Force

226. Still it is not all. The study to become "familiar, but not coarse, elegant, but not ostentatious," is practically compulsory, both in general for culture and in particular for any real mastery of style. But, having

this, a writer may still be lacking.

He may still lack

that quality of appeal, of emotional directness, which we call vivacity or vividness, strength or force. He may still leave his readers cold. Therefore, in proportion as his object is to move men directly, to be striking - and this is an object in speeches at least as much as in novels he will be discontented with elegance only. The connotation of words and phrases (§ 222), which is their meaning for style, as distinguished from their denotation, which is their meaning for business and logic, as it measures elegance measures also strength. Strong words and phrases are such as suggest emotions. The pursuit of force, then, is the pursuit of emotional connotations. Now emotional connotations attach especially to words familiar and specifically concrete. These most readily suggest images. Words like home, church, fight, have for everybody many associations. They are vague in denotation precisely because they are rich in connotation. They will not do in exposition for the same reason that makes them strong in description. Thus the native words of English are proverbially, though not always, stronger than the additions from French and Latin; brotherly than fraternal, belly than abdomen, lively than vivacious. Again, words like fireside, daybreak, bow-legged, squirt, plunge, shamble, glare, have the force of specific suggestion. Vaguer and slower suggestion comes from the abstract and general — warmth, early, deformed, enter, etc. Strength compels us to call a spade a spade. Further, to call a man sad, or miserable, or dispirited, agonized, melancholy, or whatever is demanded by the shade of meaning, is of little force beside saying that he wept like a child, or tried to smooth a drawn face, or forced a smile, or

quivered, or sat with his head on his breast (§§ 146, 156). Which method shall be followed in a given case may be determined also by elegance; but there is no doubt as to which is usually stronger.

227. The habit of the concrete and specific is the force of Homer, the force of Dante and of Chaucer, the force of all great writers that choose to move our imaginations directly. It is the strong way of narration and description because it is the way of emotional suggestion (§ 146). Even the most diverse styles, in so far as they have force, will be found to have it by these

means.

... when the sun approaches toward the gates of the morning he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like those which decked the brow of Moses when he was forced to wear a veil because himself had seen the face of God. - JEREMY TAYLOR: Holy Dying, Chapter i.

Suppose a man to dig up a galleon on the Coromandel coast, his rakish schooner keeping the while an offing under easy sail, and he, by the blaze of a great fire of wreckwood, to measure ingots by the bucketful on the uproarious beach. -STEVENSON: The Wrecker, Chapter vii.

228. The strength of phraseology that suggests images leads naturally to such as specifies images, that is, to figures of speech. Though the term figure includes every departure from the literal, its common application is but twofold. First, the force inherent in specific words may be applied by mentioning the part for the whole, or the symbol for what it habitually sym