Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/142

 Troy-books perpetually develops Grand Style; the common-places of Nestor and the other chiefs break into it in the same odd fashion in which an apparently quiet wave, hardly undulating the surface a little way from shore, will break on the beach itself with a sudden burst of glittering thunder. It is extraordinary how the γνὤμαι (the 'sentences', as Greek and Latin rhetoricians .would have called them) of the great debating Third Scene of the First Act stick in one's memory. The play itself is never acted; never used for those official purposes which, I fear, make other parts of Shakespeare best known to us both in youth and age; nor is it in all ways seductive to private reading. Yet the Grand Style impression is made constantly: though with that singular diversity and elusiveness of means, direct and suggested, to which attention has been drawn throughout. Take this:

That is no bad instance of what may be called the middle or average Shakespearian Grand Style perhaps indeed it is a little below the average. It is all the better example. The poet takes, you see, the most ordinary words the actual vocabulary of the phrase is not above even Wordsworthian proof. He takes for figure an equally ordinary antithesis 'baby' and 'giant' though a different writer would probably have spoilt his own farther chances by using 'pygmy' or 'dwarf', instead of 'baby'. And here he gets his first hold on us; for the baby, unlike the dwarf, will grow though whether it will grow to giant size or not, only the Future can tell. Then he thinks of something else 'figure' and 'mass' being not, like 'baby' and 'giant', contrasts of size merely, but indicating the form, the idea, that is to be impressed on the mass. And then he is not satisfied with