M THE CONDITIONS OF "THE GRAND STYLE." ATTHEW ARNOLD has told

us much of the Grand Style in prose and poetry, and has illustrated with no mean success what he has told us by his own example. There are few modern writers who have thrown so much of the grand style into their sayings and their verse. In his prose, we might refer

to almost any of his most characteristic sentences, for example, that about " distinction " of style, in one of the essays on Maurice and Eugenie de Guerin :—" Her soul had the same character as his talent,—distinction. Of this quality the world is impatient, it chafes against it, rails at it, insults it, hates it, it ends by receiving its influence, and by undergoing its law;" or his description of the atmosphere in Homer ; "the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky ;" or even his famous description of Heine's bitter spirit :—" One man in many millions, a Heine, may console himself and keep himself erect in suffering by a colossal irony of this sort, by covering himself and the universe with the red- fire of this sinister mockery; but the many millions cannot, cannot if they would." Still more remarkable is the grand style of his finest verse. Take his first touch in recalling Shakespeare :—

"Others abide our question, thou art free ! We ask and ask,—thou smilest and art still Out-topping knowledge ;"

or his noble description of Sophocles :—

" Whose even-balanced soul From first youth tested up to extreme old age ; Business could not make dull, nor passion wild ; Who saw life steadily and saw it whole, The mellow glory of the Attic Stage,

Singer of sweet Colonus and his child."

Or take his memorable description of Byron:— " Mat helps it now that Byron bore

With haughty scorn that mock'd the smart,

Prom Europe to the lEtolian shore' The pageant of his bleeding heart ?"

Or, as marking his very highest point in terseness and grandeur, take his description of the restless Roman noble and the Eastern mystic :—

"In his cool hall, with haggard eyes,

The Roman noble Jay; He drove abroad, in furious guise, Along the Appian Way; He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, And crowned his hair with flowers— No easier and no Tacker pass'd The impracticable hours.

The brooding East with awe beheld Her impious younger world.

The Roman tempest swelled and swelled, And on her head was hurled.

The East bowed low before the blast, In patient, deep disdain ; She let the Legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again."

If there be a truly grand style in prose and poetry, surely these are perfect specimens of what it means,—words with a stately rhythm not too stately for their statelier meaning, words ex- pressing the full consciousness of a certain splendour of sig- nificance, clothed in a seemly form and moving with a certain majesty of step. Matthew Arnold's own favourite illustration of the grand style is Milton's verse, and it would be difficult to find a happier illustration. Open Milton's poems where you will, and almost the first line on which your eye alights will give some adequate illustration of what the grand style means:—

" Oft, on a plot of rising ground, I hear the far-off curfew sound Over some wide-watered shore, Swinging slow with sullen roar."

What a majesty in the tone and rhythm of this description of a mere sound entering the ear ! Or take the next few lines, in which a first impression on the eye is imaged with equal grandeur :—

" Or, if the air will not permit, Some still, removed place will fit, Where glowing embers through the room Teach light to counterfeit a gloom."

But go to Milton's prose works, and we shall be disappointed. There we find not the -grand style, but something very different,—the grandiose style, where the dignity and. sim-

plicity of true culture are wanting to the effect of grandeur, where the ear is jarred by a pomp of manner too great for the weight of meaning. Take, for instance, a passage which is sometimes quoted as one illustrating the singular grandeur of Milton's prose style, but which appears to us overloaded with "gaudy and ungraceful ornament." "Look upon this, thy poor and almost spent and expiring Church ; leave her not a prey to these importunate wolves that wait and think long till they devour thy tender flock; these wild boars that have broke into thy vineyard, and left the print of their polluting hoofs on the souls of thy servants. 0 let them not bring about their damned designs, that stand now at the entrance of the bottomless pit, expecting the watchword to open and let those dreadful locusts and scorpions to reinvolve us in that pitchy cloud of infernal darkness, where we should never more see the sun of thy truth again, never hope for the cheerful dawn,

never more hear the bird of morning sing !" "Wolves that wait and think" are obviously very unnatural wolves ; wild boars that leave "the print of their polluting hoofs" on the soul, are

wild boars unknown to natural history ; "scorpions and locusts" which are to hide "the sun of truth" are clearly metaphorical scorpions and locusts, so that when we are told that they will prevent us from ever more hearing" the bird of morning" sing, we ask, bewildered, what worse loss than the loss of "the sun of truth" the loss of the lark's song is meant to prefigure. Clearly, this is not the "grand," but the " grandiose " style, the style in which the form of expression smothers the meaning, instead of adequately reflecting it ; and no fault is so common in Milton's prose as this,—a fault, indeed, which almost permeates it. The same fault is often to be found in the prose of Dr. Johnson, though hardly ever in his conversation, where we may find plenty of specimens of a style very closely approaching to the grand style, and falling short of it only in the missing sense of that perfect rhythm and delicacy of minute impression which seems essential to soften the grandeur of a great person- ality into the aptness and beauty of true stateliness. Dr. Johnson's "roar," as it was called, was not the grand style, because Dr. Johnson was not a poet, and could only write one kind of impressive verse. For the grand style, there must be not only some consciousness of a great personality, but also some real sense of correspondence between the rhythm of the poet's mind and the rhythm of the universal order itself. Milton felt this correspondence profoundly, so soon as he was in the mood of verse, and there is no clearer indication of the true poetic nature than this,—that the mood of verse should be a tempering and restraining mood, a mood which puts a bridle on the vagrant fancy, and curtails excess of metaphor and verbiage, instead of multiplying it; and this restraining, tempering, and stimulating touch was certainly

communicated. to Milton's imagination by the mood of verse.. But in the mood of controversy, Milton did not feel at all this restraining sense that he must in some sense conform his own mind to the rhythm of the divine order, and hence we see in the eloquence of his controversial works little but the untamed

luxuriance of prodigal fancy and irritable self-will. It would be impossible, nevertheless, to find a better illustration of the sense which a great poet ought to have that his mind is bound to conform its own rhythm to some rhythm of divine order, to be dis- cerned by him, though with difficulty, in the world without, than Milton's great invocation to Urania, at the beginning of the seventh book of "Paradise Lost," to descend with him and guide him in the sphere of earth, as she had previously guided him in the Erupersensual world

More safe, I sing with mortal voice, unchanged To hoarse or mate, though fallen on evil days, On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues; In darkness and with dangers compass'd round And solitude, yet not alone, whilst thou Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when morn Purples the East ;—still govern thou my song, Urania, and fit audience find, though few.'

We could not give a nobler example of "the grand style" than those few lines, or a clearer indication that the poet whose language falls naturally into its rhythm, must be one with a deep sense of personal greatness, dominated by the thought that unless that greatness is subdued into full harmony

with the rhythm of a diviner order than its own, it cannot be the true greatness. Verse almost always exercises this spell over Milton, subduing his thought into a sort of majestic humility not natural to him in any but the poetic mood. In prose, he is often a scold, and his voice betrays all the discords of a scold; in verse, a lofty patience comes to the succour of his

greatness, and makes it chime in with the divine order, instead of simply clashing with others in angry competition for the divine favour.

It may be supposed, perhaps, that "the grand style," in this

sense, is the style of all true poets, so far as they are true poets. But this we should entirely deny. Tennyson, for instance, is not only a true, but a great poet, and he can command the grand style at times ; but then, again, a great deal of his poetry, and a great deal of his fine poetry, is not written in the grand style, and some of his most effective poetry is written in a style wholly inconsistent with the grand style, in a self- pitying, or a feverish and morbid style. " Ulysses " is in

the grand style ; " Tithonus " is in the grand style ; many passages in the "Idyls of the King," more especially "The Passing of Arthur" and parts of "The Coming of Arthur," are in the grand style ; but "Tears, idle tears," could not possibly be in the grand style, its note being essentially that of the minor key ; " Locksley Hall" is not only not in the grand style, but is the reflection of a morbid mood ; "The Gardener's Daughter," and "Enoch Arden," and " Aylmer's Field," and "The Golden Supper," and the tales in verse in general, are not, and could not be, in the grand style, as they are not chastened enough, not subdued enough in spirit, not lucid enough in their outlook on the Universe, for the grand style. Again, very little that either Byron or Shelley

ever wrote is in "the grand style,"—parts of the "Cenci," the concluding lines of " Alastor," perhaps the sonnet on " Mutability " and on " Ozymandias," and a few other poems,

being exceptions in the case of Shelley. But Shelley un- doubtedly knew what it was. The concluding passage in " Alastor " is one of the finest examples of " the grand style" which our language contains :—

"It is a woe too deep for tears' when all

Is raft at once, when some surpassing spirit Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans, The passionate tumult of a clinging hope, But pale despair and cold tranquillity, Nature's vast frame, the web of human things,

Birth and the grave, -which are not what they were."

Mr. Swinburne has rarely touched "the grand style," except, perhaps, in the self-restrained iambics of "Atalanta" and the other Greek play. Mr. Browning almost anxiously repudiates the grand style, his great ambition being to be familiar, modern, and interlocutory. But of Shakespeare, one naturally asks,—did not Shakespeare understand thoroughly the grand style ? We should answer certainly he understood it, but he hardly ever used it when he was writing in his own name. He used it to per- fection when writing in the name of a great prince like Hamlet, a Roman aristocrat like Coriolanus, a mighty magician like Prospero, a desolate queen like Cleopatra ; but in his own " Sonnets" he hardly ever touches the grand style. He seems hardly to have thought enough of his own personality to write, when writing in his own name, with the high solem- nity of Milton or Arnold. He reserved his illustrations of the grand style for the regal natures which he so finely painted,—for Cleopatra, when, in her passionate grief, she de-

clares that,—

"—There is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting Moon ;"

for Prospero, when he tells us that,— " We are such stuff

As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep ;"

for Macbeth, when he declares that,— " Macbeth has murdered sleep."

The "grand style" used by a poet writing in his own name implies a deep sense of sonorous chords in his own being, in perfect harmony with the deeper chords of the universal order, and this many true poets have never felt at all, and many more only in rare moods. Wordsworth knew well what the grand style was, and used it not nnfrequently with the most magnifi- cent effect, as, for example, in the " Ode to Duty," every word of which is in the grand style,—and in the great ode, on the "Intimations of Immortality," almost the whole of which is written in that style, though with some curious and remarkable flaws. But some of Wordsworth's finer poems were in altogether a different key. "The Daisy," "The Little Celandine," "The Green Linnet," and all the poems of that class, are not and could not have been in the grand style. They do not echo the deep sense of personal grandeur in Wordsworth so far as he was in harmony with the universal order, and were not meant to do so, but only to reflect the little ripple of joy with which he received one of the smaller im- pressions of Nature's beauty. For "the grand style," it is requisite that the writer should first be conscious, either directly or dramatically, of some great personality ; and next, that he should feel deeply the sympathy between that personality and the great music of the divine order of which it forms a part.