The Analogy Change. 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 by which other arts obtain relief, continuity, and vigour no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical progression, and convey a definite conventional import." It is an acute comparison, happily indicative The Law of of the morose angularity that words offer to whoso handles them, admirably insistent on the chief of the incommodities imposed upon the writer, the necessity, at all times and at all costs, to mean something. The boon of the recurring monotonous expanse, that an apprentice may fill, the breathing-space of restful mechanical repetition, are denied to the writer, who must needs shoulder the hod himself, and lay on the mortar, in ever varying patterns, with his own trowel. This is indeed the ordeal of the master, the canker-worm of the penny-a-liner, who, poor fellow, means nothing, and spends his life in the vain effort to get words to do the same. But if in this respect architecture and literature are confessed to differ, there remains the likeness that Mr. Stevenson detects in the building materials of the two arts, those blocks of "arbitrary size and figure; finite and quite rigid." There is truth enough in the comparison to make it illuminative, but he would be a rash dialectician who should attempt to draw from it, by way of inference, a philosophy of letters. Words are piled on words, and bricks on bricks, but of the two you are invited to think words the more intractable. Truly, it was a man of letters who said it, avenging himself on his profession for the never-ending toil it imposed, by miscalling it, with grim pleasantry, the architecture of the nursery. Finite and quite rigid words are not, in any sense that holds good of bricks. They move and change, they wax and wane, they wither and burgeon; from age to age, from place to place, from mouth to mouth, they are never at a stay. They take on colour, intensity, and vivacity from the infection of neighbourhood; the same word is of several shapes and diverse imports in one and the same sentence; they depend on the building that they compose for the very chemistry of the stuff that composes them. The same epithet is used in the phrases "a fine day" and "fine irony,” in “fair trade” and "a fair goddess." Were different symbols to be invented for these sundry meanings the art of literature would perish. For words carry with them all the meanings they have worn, and the writer shall be judged by those that he selects for prominence in the train of his thought. A slight technical implication, a faint tinge of archaism, in the common turn of speech that you employ, and in a moment you have shaken off the mob that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a select audience of ticket-holders with closed doors. A single natural phrase of peasant speech, a direct physical sense given to a word that genteel parlance authorises readily enough in its metaphorical sense, and at a touch you have blown the roof off the drawing-room of the villa, and have set its obscure inhabitants wriggling in the unaccustomed sun. In choosing a sense for your words you choose also an audience for them. To one word, then, there are many meanings, according as it falls in the sentence, according as its successive ties and associations are broken or renewed. And here, seeing that the stupidest of all possible meanings is very commonly the slang meaning, it will be well to treat briefly of slang. For slang, in the looser acceptation of the term, is of two kinds, differing, and indeed diametrically opposite, in origin and worth. Sometimes it is the technical diction that has perforce been coined to name the operations, incidents, and habits of some way of life that society despises or deliberately elects to disregard. This sort of slang, which often invents names for what would otherwise go nameless, is vivid, accurate, and necessary, an addition of wealth to the world's dictionaries and of compass to the world's range of thought. Society, mistily conscious of the sympathy that lightens in any habitual name, seems to have become aware, by one of those wonderful processes of chary instinct which serve the great, vulnerable, timid organism in lieu of a brain, that to accept of the pickpocket his names for the mysteries of his trade is to accept also a new moral stand-point and outlook on the question of property. For this reason, and by no special masonic precautions of his own, the pickpocket is allowed to keep the admirable devices of his nomenclature for the familiar uses of himself and his mates, until a Villon arrives to prove that this language, too, was awaiting the advent of its bully and master. In the meantime, what directness and modest sufficiency of utterance distinguishes the dock compared with the fumbling prolixity of the old gentleman on the bench! It is the trite story,-romanticism forced to plead at the bar of classicism fallen into its dotage, Keats judged by Blackwood, Wordsworth exciting the pained astonishment of Miss Anna Seward. Accuser and accused alike recognise that a question of diction |