One has no time to examine the word and vote
upon its rank and standing, the automatic recognition of its supremacy is
so immediate. There is a plenty of acceptable literature which deals
largely in approximations, but it may be likened to a fine landscape seen
through the rain; the right word would dismiss the rain, then you would
see it better. It doesn't rain when Howells is at work.
And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his speech? and its
cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its architectural felicities of
construction, its graces of expression, its pemmican quality of
compression, and all that? Born to him, no doubt. All in shining good
order in the beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just
as extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear and
use. He passed his fortieth year long and long ago; but I think his
English of today--his perfect English, I wish to say--can throw down the
glove before his English of that antique time and not be afraid.
I will got back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the reader to
examine this passage from it which I append. I do not mean examine it in
a bird's-eye way; I mean search it, study it. And, of course, read it
aloud. I may be wrong, still it is my conviction that one cannot get out
of finely wrought literature all that is in it by reading it mutely:
Mr.
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