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'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, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar,
that a pediment, a third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of
just such arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect is
condemned to design the palace of his art. Nor is this all; for
since these blocks, or words, are the acknowledged currency of our
daily affairs, there are here possible none of those suppressions
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