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is to please the supersensual ear, is yet addressed, throughout and
first of all, to the demands of logic. Whatever be the
obscurities, whatever the intricacies of the argument, the neatness
of the fabric must not suffer, or the artist has been proved
unequal to his design. And, on the other hand, no form of words
must be selected, no knot must be tied among the phrases, unless
knot and word be precisely what is wanted to forward and illuminate
the argument; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game. The
genius of prose rejects the cheville no less emphatically than the
laws of verse; and the cheville, I should perhaps explain to some
of my readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employed
to strike a balance in the sound. Pattern and argument live in
each other; and it is by the brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis
of the second, that we judge the strength and fitness of the first.
Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so to speak, a peg to
plait about, takes up at once two or more elements or two or more
views of the subject in hand; combines, implicates, and contrasts
them; and while, in one sense, he was merely seeking an occasion
for the necessary knot, he will be found, in the other, to have
greatly enriched the meaning, or to have transacted the work of two
sentences in the space of one. In the change from the successive
shallow statements of the old chronicler to the dense and luminous
flow of highly synthetic narrative, there is implied a vast amount
of both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we clearly see,
recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep and stimulating
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