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The Rhythm of Life-Part5_Alice Meynell(1847-1924)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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privilege and an advantage incalculable--that to possess that half

of the language within which Latin heredities lurk and Romanesque



allusions are at play is to possess the state and security of a dead

tongue, without the death.



But now I spoke of words encountering as gay strangers, various in

origin, divided in race, within a master's phrase. The most



beautiful and the most sudden of such meetings are of course in

Shakespeare. 'Superfluous kings,' 'A lass unparalleled,'



'Multitudinous seas:' we needed not to wait for the eighteenth

century or for the nineteenth to learn the splendour of such



encounters, of such differences, of such nuptial unlikeness and

union. But it is well that we should learn them afresh. And it is



well, too, that we should not resist the rhythmic reaction bearing

us now somewhat to the side of the Latin. Such a reaction is in



some sort an ethical need for our day. We want to quell the

exaggerated decision of monosyllables. We want the poise and the



pause that imply vitality at times better than headstrong movement

expresses it. And not the phrase only but the form of verse might



render us timely service. The controlling couplet might stay with a

touch a modern grief, as it ranged in order the sorrows of Canning



for his son. But it should not be attempted without a distinct

intention of submission on the part of the writer. The couplet



transgressed against, trespassed upon, shaken off, is like a law

outstripped, defied--to the dignity neither of the rebel nor of the



rule. To Letters do we look now for the guidance and direction

which the very closeness of the emotiontaking us by the heart makes



necessary. Shall not the Thing more and more, as we compose

ourselves to literature, assume the honour, the hesitation, the



leisure, the reconciliation of the Word?

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES



It is good to go, now and again--let the American phrase be

permitted--'back of' some of our contemporaries. We never desired



them as coevals. We never wished to share an age with them; we

share nothing else with them. And we deliver ourselves from them by



passing, in literature, into the company of an author who wrote

before their time, and yet is familiarly modern. To read Dr. Oliver



Wendell Holmes, then, is to go behind the New Humorist--into a time

before he was, or his Humour. Obviously we go in like manner behind



many another, but the funny writer of the magazines is suggested

because in reference to him our act has a special significance. We



connect him with Dr. Holmes by a reluctant ancestry, by an

impertinent descent. It may be objected that such a connection is



but a trivial thing to attribute, as a conspicuousincident, to a

man of letters. So it is. But the triviality has wide allusions.



It is often a question which of several significanttrivialities a

critic shall choose in his communication with a reader who does not



insist that all the grave things shall be told him. And, by the

way, are we ever sufficientlygrateful for that reader, whom the



last few years have given to us, or to whom we have been given by

the last few years? A trivial connexion has remote and negative



issues. To go to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's period is to get rid

of many things; to go to himself is especially to get rid of the New



Humour, yet to stand at its unprophetic source. And we love such

authors as Dickens and this American for their own sake, refusing to



be aware of their corrupt following. We would make haste to ignore

their posterity, and to assure them that we absolve them from any



fault of theirs in the bastardy.

Humour is the most conspicuous thing in the world, which must



explain why the little humour in Elsie Venner and the Breakfast

Table series is not only the first thing the critic touches but the






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