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ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE {1}
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 never can wholly be explained; nay, on the
principle laid down in Hudibras, that
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