Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/135

 has everybody called them so in this simplicity and consummateness of phrase? Try obvious variants:

The fickle glory of an April day,

or 'the treacherous', or 'the passing', or a dozen others, not to mention the non-obvious ones which would have commended themselves to second- or tenth-rate writers of that day and this—far-fetched and dear-bought frigidities which will suggest themselves by the dozen. Then do the same thing with 'glory,' substituting 'splendour,' 'beauty,' what you will. Put all the results of experiment beside the actual text, and you will, if you have a Grand Style ear, have very little difficulty in determining where the Grand Style lies—with Ariel and the bee, not beside the lamp and in the chemist's shop.

To go through all the plays, even by sample at fancy, would be impossible; but it may perhaps be permitted to me to give a few more of my sortes Shakespearianae. I shall avoid, as I have avoided, except by general reference, the most famous passages—for there is no need to have recourse to them, and the means by which their effects are achieved, though always different in individual, are never different in general character from those manifest in the smaller instances—if any can be called small. The most general touch of all is perhaps that already noticed—the ambidexterity with which the poet uses the most and the least unusual phrases and words. He has neither a studied grandiloquence nor a studied simplicity, nor does he specially affect that peculiar source of sublimity—that is to say, 'transport'—which consists in a sort of catachresis or deliberate misuse of words in secondary intentions, like that frequently adopted by Sir Thomas Browne. He will at one moment write a phrase 'to tear with thunder the wide cheeks of the air', which has the very sound-effect of which it speaks, and which has the largeness of the universe itself,