ic skill that a writer who
systematically adopts this method should yet be invariably lively. He
goes on blacking the chimney with a persistency which somehow amuses us
because he puts so much heart into his work. He proves the most obvious
truths again and again; but his vivacity never flags. This tendency
undoubtedly leads to great defects of style. His sentences are
monotonous and mechanical. He has a perfect hatred of pronouns, and for
fear of a possible entanglement between 'hims' and 'hers' and 'its,' he
will repeat not merely a substantive, but a whole group of substantives.
Sometimes, to make his sense unmistakable, he will repeat a whole
formula, with only a change in the copula. For the same reason, he hates
all qualifications and parentheses. Each thought must be resolved into
its constituent parts; each argument must be expressed as a simple
proposition: and his paragraphs are rather aggregates of independent
atoms than possessed of a continuous unity. His writing--to use a
favourite formula of his own--bears the same relation to a style of
graceful modulation that a bit of mosaic work bears to a picture. Each
phrase has its distinct hue, instead of melting into its neighbours.
Here we have a black patch and there a white. There are no half tones,
no subtle interblending of different currents of thought. It is partly
for this reason that his descriptions of character are often so
unsatisfactory. He likes to represent a man as a bundle of
contradictions, because it enables him to obtain startling contrasts. He
heightens a vice in one place, a virtue in another, and piles them
together in a heap, without troubling himself to ask whether nature can
make such monsters, or preserve them if made. To anyone given to
analysis, these contrasts are actually painful. There is a story of the
Duke of Wellington having once stated that the rats got into his bottles
in Spain. 'They must have been very large bottles or very small rats,'
said somebody. 'On the contrary,' replied the Duke, 'the rats were very
large and the bottles very small.' Macaulay delights in leaving us face
to face with such contrasts in more important matters. Boswell must, we
would say, have been a clever man or his biography cannot have been so
good as you say. On the contrary, says Macaulay, he was the greatest of
fools and the best of biographers. He strikes a discord and purposely
fails to resolve it. To men of more delicate sensibility the result i