Editor's Study.
THE readers of the Study might very properly ask us to give a fuller expression of what we meant in the last number when we spoke of "the direct appeal" as the distinctive trait of what is best in our contemporary literature. The writer charges a phrase with his own meanings, and unless he makes these explicit the reader is left to charge it with such meanings as occur to him—which may be quite different.
Moreover, the single illustration offered, Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg, might easily have been misleading. We associated the trait with plainness of speech, as if that were essential to it; but it is not. Sincerity, the absence of all gloss—these are essential. In these respects Lincoln's speech is a model for the present-day orator. It has no trace of that rhetorical gloss which in some degree veneered even the greatest oratory of the past—especially those examples of it which the schoolboy eagerly selects for show recitations. But rhetoric itself is not, because of these vicious examples, an art to be abandoned. It is not necessary to the directness of eloquent appeal that, like Mark Antony, one should "only speak right on."
Oral as compared with written speech has some disadvantages. It does not select, it must find, its audience, which is usually made up of classes widely differing in taste and intelligence. The master of such speech to-day is not magniloquent; his style is not formed upon that of bygone masters, which would seem out of place and out of time; yet he must avail of all the virtues and the graces of rhetorical art if he would be as effective as Burke and Wirt and Webster were in their time and in the way of their time. The captivating charm, the happy allusiveness, the terse epigram, the convincing argument, the imagination which creates illusion—these belong to the eloquence of every age.
The greatest American master in this field just within the memory of the new generation was George William Curtis; but in the brief period which separates us from him there has been a perceptible change, so that the way of appeal to-day is not just his way. In the new way will come the new master, and his distinction need not be the plainness of his speech or the lack of any grace or virtue which distinguished the old masters, the great orators of the past.
The directness of the appeal in literary expression involves a complexity of revolt against old forms. The writer is more variously tempted than the speaker into indirections. The latter would never call the sun "the orb of day" or by the classic name of "Phœbus." Yet there was a period in English literature which lasted for a long time, and is not even now wholly beyond the reach of our recollection, when it seemed a breach of dignity for a writer to call anything by its right name. The concrete thing must be relieved of its vulgarity by the masque of a phrase. The horse was "the fleet courser," and all fruits were indiscriminately "Pomona's treasures." Qualities—abstract enough in their common names—were redeemed from the vice of particularity by personification. The processes of abstraction and generalization in the so-called classic age of English literature uprooted all things and set them floating in the air; the mind was not simply a mirror reflecting things, but made composite photographs of the images themselves. Nature was seen as a bundle of these composites.
The gloss of allegory, after its long persistence in literature and art, was long ago repudiated. This was another form of indirection.
The fallacies of analogy, especially those which result from the comparison of the higher to the lower, have affected philosophy more than literature; yet, in poetry at least, fancy has frequently indulged itself in the habit of careless and often incongruous comparison, not justified, as the true parable is, by luminous suggestion or disclosure. When Longfellow writes of
A feeling of sadness and longing
Which is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles rain,
