1. CHOICE OF WORDS. - The art of literature stands apart
from among its sisters, because the material in which the
literary artist works is the dialect of life; hence, on the
one hand, a strange freshness and immediacy of address to the
public mind, which is ready prepared to understand it; but
hence, on the other, a singular limitation. The sister arts
enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the
modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned to work in
mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have seen
these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a
pediment, a third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of
just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary
architect is condemned to design the palace of his art. Nor
is this all; for since these blocks, or words, are the
acknowledged currency of our daily affairs, there are here
possible none of those suppressions by which other arts
obtain relief, continuity, and vigour: no hieroglyphic
touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as in
painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but every word,
phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical
progression, and convey a definite conventional import.
Now the first merit which attracts in the pages of a good
writer, or the talk of a brilliant conversationalist, is the
apt choice and contrast of the words employed. It is,
indeed, a strange art to take these blocks, rudely conceived
for the purpose of the market or the bar, and by tact of
application touch them to the finest meanings and
distinctions, restore to them their primal energy, wittily
shift them to another issue, or make of them a drum to rouse
the passions.
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