A place of peace, not of indifference.It is impossible not to charge some of the moralists of the last century with an indifference into which they educated their platitudes and into which their platitudes educated them.Addison thus gave and took, until he was almost incapable of coming within arm's-length of a real or spiritual emotion.There is no knowing to what distance the removal of the 'appropriate sentiment' from the central soul might have attained but for the change and renewal in language, which came when it was needed.Addison had assuredly removed eternity far from the apprehension of the soul when his Cato hailed the 'pleasing hope,' the 'fond desire;' and the touch of war was distant from him who conceived his 'repulsed battalions' and his 'doubtful battle.'
What came afterwards, when simplicity and nearness were restored once more, was doubtless journeyman's work at times.Men were too eager to go into the workshop of language.There were unreasonable raptures over the mere making of common words.'A hand-shoe! a finger-hat! a foreword! Beautiful!' they cried; and for the love of German the youngest daughter of Chrysale herself might have consented to be kissed by a grammarian.It seemed to be forgotten that a language with all its construction visible is a language little fitted for the more advanced mental processes; that its images are material; and that, on the other hand, a certain spiritualising and subtilising effect of alien derivations is a privilege and an advantage incalculable--that to possess that half of the language within which Latin heredities lurk and Romanesque allusions are at play is to possess the state and security of a dead tongue, without the death.
But now I spoke of words encountering as gay strangers, various in origin, divided in race, within a master's phrase.The most beautiful and the most sudden of such meetings are of course in Shakespeare.'Superfluous kings,' 'A lass unparalleled,'
'Multitudinous seas:' we needed not to wait for the eighteenth century or for the nineteenth to learn the splendour of such encounters, of such differences, of such nuptial unlikeness and union.But it is well that we should learn them afresh.And it is well, too, that we should not resist the rhythmic reaction bearing us now somewhat to the side of the Latin.Such a reaction is in some sort an ethical need for our day.We want to quell the exaggerated decision of monosyllables.We want the poise and the pause that imply vitality at times better than headstrong movement expresses it.And not the phrase only but the form of verse might render us timely service.The controlling couplet might stay with a touch a modern grief, as it ranged in order the sorrows of Canning for his son.But it should not be attempted without a distinct intention of submission on the part of the writer.The couplet transgressed against, trespassed upon, shaken off, is like a law outstripped, defied--to the dignity neither of the rebel nor of the rule.To Letters do we look now for the guidance and direction which the very closeness of the emotion taking us by the heart makes necessary.Shall not the Thing more and more, as we compose ourselves to literature, assume the honour, the hesitation, the leisure, the reconciliation of the Word?
