passionate,
dignified, happily mirthful, or at the last and least, romantic in
design.

III

ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs
and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the
surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness,
and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness
and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. In a similar
way, psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers an
abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our analysis than from
any poverty native to the mind. And perhaps in aesthetics the reason is
the same: those disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem
so perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; and those conscious
and unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy of the serious artist
to employ were yet, if we had the power to trace them to their springs,
indications of a delicacy of the sense finer than we conceive, and hints
of ancient harmonies in nature. This ignorance at least is largely
irremediable. We shall never learn the affinities of beauty, for they
lie too deep in nature and too far back in the mysterious history of
man. The amateur, in consequence, will always grudgingly receive details
of method, which can be stated but can never wholly be explained; nay,
on the principle laid down in Hudibras, that

"Still the less they understand,
The more they admire the sleight-of-hand,"

many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution in the ardour
of their pleasure. I must therefore warn that well-known character, the
general reader, that I am here embarked upon a most distasteful
business: taking down the picture from the wall and looking on the back;
and, like the inquiring child, pulling the musical cart to pieces.

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, de