" LE MOT PROPRE."

FRANCE is Europe's duelling-ground, and the best phrases for literary duellers have ever been forged in France. When Romantics and Classics were crossing swords, description was a prime count in the quarrel, and the Romantics wielded with pride their phrases, is snot propre and la description rue. Description by the eye was indeed the new thing that they had brought. Classical description is vague— for precision is held undignified—and its call is to scholarship and the cultured ear; but Romantic description is detailed, coloured, intimate, and it reeks not at all of dignity. The snot propre is its foundation, "the word that belongs" to the thing, the precise epithet, the phrase that makes a picture. A Romantic dog may be "big" or " brown "—the mot propre in its simplest form—but the Classical dog is a colourless beast generalized into dignity. It is sometimes not called a dog at all, for " de la fidelite respectable soutien " is a more elevated name than " chien." This sort of thing could not, of course, last long ; it was ended, and the men who ended it were only going back to older things.

Detailed description is as old as Homer ; one thinks of the similes, of Achilles' shield, of the white boar's-teeth in Odysseus' cap, of Nausicaa's family washing-day—though Homer was no Hugo, and there is much that he will not detail. Do we know the colour of Achilles' eyes, or what flowers grew along Scamander Do we read of sunsets over Troy ? Natural beauties to frame the tale, colour to catch the eye, these are lacking, and though men die and lie, and love and loathe, their faces are in shadow ; we cannot see what is in their eyes. Much is quoted and requoted, too, straight from the Handbook of Sacrifice, and convention rules a great kingdom in the epithets. But convention fixes and does not create, and there must have been a time when nothing had dulled the gleam of Homer's metals that flash at every turn of the tale—the glancing helm of Hector, the golden breast- plates of Kings, the shining cauldrons. To us they all shimmer in the half-real light of fairy-tale, but the harder light of familiar life must have shone on them once. The epithets, too, must once have been alive, before convention slew them. Some early Homer must have seen that the dawn had rosy fingers, and that the deep was dark like wine before iSaBoaluereAos and amp became mere bricks for the building of hexameters. Indeed, the Homeric epithet is the mot propre shot on the wing and stuffed, of the true, fine breed, but dead; and long enough it was before such wings gleamed again in the poetic skies.

The fact is that Homer and all the ancients are less Romantic than the Romantics of to-day, and very much less Classical than the Classics at their worst. For, indeed, the Classics of the grand siècle had climbed so high that they could not breathe. The human race cannot live for long on the poetic heights where Racine stood, and in prose the Classics rarely produced a book that called to the human heart at all. Yet one such book there is: Mme. de la Fayette did what might seem the impossible. La Prineesse de Cleves is all written in that cold, aloof classic tongue which will not go by way of the senses to your heart. All the descriptions are perfectly vague : a woman is " merveilleusement belle," a man " admirablement Bien fait," and that is generally all. Here is Mary Queen of Scots: " Marie Stuart, seine d'Ecosse, qui venait d'epouser M. le Dauphin et qu'on appelait la Reine Dauphine, etait une personae parfaite pour l'esprit of pour le corps." We get no nearer view. Yet, in spite of the chill and rarefied Classical air, the tale is one of the most moving of all love-tales, and the core of it is warm from the central fires of human life.

The rush that stormed the Classical heights carried the

dormers far down the other side. In the last hundred years description has gone further towards precision and richness than it had ever gone in all the world's literature, before Classicism came to bind and blind. All the play made with faces in the modern style, all the play made with colours, backgrounds, and scenery, was unknown in any considerable degree till a century and a half ago. Chaucer, of course, and Shakespeare could draw a face, but it was not a common accomplishment, and even they dealt little in changes of look save for occasional smiles and frowns. Bet the story-teller of to-day makes single features talk like books. "His thin lips curled" and "her grey eyes flashed" are the common- places of the new popular style, and we know of dimples that come and go, of wrinkles that shape a " T " on the brow, of blushes that mantle (beginning at the neck). This may be the snot propre caricatured, but this kind of description can he good. It is certainly a possible source of power, and equally certainly it is new. The Romantic victory gave it to us.

Colour is less of a novelty. Gold and purple are as old as kingship, and Pindar, poet of Kings, is lavish thereof. And that princely epithet of Athens comes to mind which Aristo- phanes has taught for generations to Fifth Forms :—

"0 rich and renowned and with violets crowned, 0 Athens the envied of nations."

lotragybayos—what a word ! They used to say that it meant no more than the purple of an Imperial city, but if you have seen Athena ringed in that faint haze of iris blue, you will know that it means much more than that. Yet colour in ancient literature is rare, and like the sunset it is a thing of the hilltops. You see it best on the heights, in poetry, that is, and in the great passages of poetry. With us it is an affair of every day. Mr. Chesterton writes in a detective tale : "A perfect dome of peacock-green sank into gold amid the blackening trees and the dark violet distances. The glowing green tint was just deep enough to pick out in points of crystal one or two stars." So we moderns illumine our stage.

Here we are still in an objective world dealing with things

that delight the eye, but the mot propre can also reflect from the mind, reflect its lights on the thing described. Then comes the " pathetic fallacy," the smiling meadows and frowning hills that are commonplace, the "cruel, creeping foam "that Ruskin would have robbed of its epithets, the talking machinery of Mr. Kipling, and all those many manners of speech whereby unfeeling things are made to feel that the emotional wealth of a scene may pass from mind to mind. This emotional wealth is a different thing from the sensual wealth of mere beautiful things. If Tennyson paints for the picture's sake, Words- worth paints to create a mood; and it is this subjective element that gives the greatest work its power. The picture of Venice and the Adriatic dawn, in the ninth chapter of Beauchamp's Career, is sometimes claimed as the finest description in English prose, and if it is so, it is because before it was painted it was not only seen but felt. The whole passage cannot be transcribed here, but it ends thus, very beautifully : "It seemed unlike morning to the lovess, but as if night had broken with a revelation of the kingdom

in the heart of night. While the broad smooth waters rolled unlighted beneath that transfigured upper sphere, it was possible to think the scene might vanish like a view caught out of darkness by lightning. Alp over burning Alp, and around them a hueless dawn." This is very much more than pictorial art. Beauty is not merely copied down, it is used as a language in which the mind speaks freely to other minds. Here is the mot propre not perfected but transformed; it is the description vecue, not merely the description vue.

Dawn and the night sky and the hills and all things that are part of our common outdoor framework are dear to the artist who paints to move the heart, because they are things that do stir in all men much or little of certain primal and common thoughts; they are things that men do feel as well as see. Stevenson knew the dawn well. He and "Modestine" had felt it together in the hills, and no man can give the scent of it so well as he. He does not always deal in colour; it is the pulsing of life that he feels everywhere, and it was he who told us first of that strange hour in the night when all living things wake together for a moment and stir a little and sleep again. It is Stevenson who has made the life of the road a glorious thing, touching it sometimes with so clear a light that we seem to be living it with him, and looking with him into those "bright eyes of Danger" which were his " mistress still." His art is best seen in such a short phrase as that, and in those single words—" words that belong " indeed—which his humour sets at an angle to catch an unusual light

"Or let Autumn fall on me While afield I linger, Silencing the bird on tree,

Biting the blue finger ;

White as meal the frosty field, Warm the hearth-side haven— Not to Autumn will I yield, Not to Winter even."

Stevenson can describe too, in terms of sight, things that most men only feel or think, and could never, without him, see at all. Perhaps this is the highest work that the art of description vue has done. The greater craftsman nowadays can always visualize and paint for you an historian's generalizations or a philosopher's thoughts. Stevenson somewhere describes our universe as science has begun to show it. He is speaking of life :— "In two main shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth ; the animal and the vegetable . . . the second rooted to the spot, the first coming detached out of the mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects, or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds ; a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered, the heart stops. To what passes with the anchored vermin we have little clue: doubtless they have their joys and sorrows . . . it appears not how. . . . Meanwhile our rotatory island, loaded with predatory life and more drenched with blood, both animal and vegetable, than ever mutinied ship, scuds through space with unimaginable speed, and turns alternate cheeks to the reverberation of a blazing world ninety million miles away."

This is cruel, but it is wonderful. Fronde more gently and as wonderfully writes of the mind of Europe at the passing of

the Middle Age :—

" All the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of the universe."

Here is an historian who is a seer too.

Reality in all this is never far away, but there are times when it passes out of sight. All true poets and "makers" in their greater hours have made something out of nothing; but where the pure art of the word is in question it is Stevenson who must give testimony again and again. He it is who was once led by his rover's dreams to that kingdom of romance on which Keats opened his magic casement in the "Nightingale." The magic -which filled the beaker with "the warm South" and summoned into sight that "foam of perilous seas" is a greater magic certainly than this, but it is not of a different kind, and the power of both is the power of the word :- " I will make you brooches, and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and starshine at night, And I will build a palace fit for you and me Of green days in forests and blue days at sea."

There is the dreamer in the land which all word-craftsmen since the beginning of the world have tried knowingly at unknowingly to reach. In the last analysis it is the owl propre that led him there.