There is then another element of comeliness
hitherto overlooked in this analysis: the contents of the
phrase. Each phrase in literature is built of sounds, as
each phrase in music consists of notes. One sound suggests,
echoes, demands, and harmonises with another; and the art of
rightly using these concordances is the final art in
literature. It used to be a piece of good advice to all
young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was
sound, in so far as it prevented daubing. None the less for
that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of
those blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of
the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends
implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel
demands to be repeated; the consonant demands to be repeated;
and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow
the adventures of a letter through any passage that has
particularly pleased you; find it, perhaps, denied a while,
to tantalise the ear; find it fired again at you in a whole
broadside; or find it pass into congenerous sounds, one
liquid or labial melting away into another. And you will
find another and much stranger circumstance. Literature is
written by and for two senses: a sort of internal ear, quick
to perceive 'unheard melodies'; and the eye, which directs
the pen and deciphers the printed phrase. Well, even as
there are rhymes for the eye, so you will find that there are
assonances and alliterations; that where an author is running
the open A, deceived by the eye and our strange English
spelling, he will often show a tenderness for the flat A; and
that where he is running a particular consonant, he will not
improbably rejoice to write it down even when it is mute or
bears a different value.
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