Page:The king's English (IA kingsenglish00fowlrich).pdf/226

212 a good thing; but it is a good thing for all that. As instances of unjustifiable mannerism, we may select 'fit to be the favourites..., and fit to be great orators'; 'not political communities..., but political communities...'; 'something which he wanted, but something which he did not know that he wanted'; 'a man like Walpole, or a man like Louis Napoleon'; 'without reluctance and without cessation'; 'who did not like..., who did not like...'; and 'without Spanish and without French'. We have mentioned clearness as the ultimate motive for repetition of this kind: in this last sentence, we get not clearness, but obscurity. Any one would suppose that there was some point in the distinction between Spanish and French: there is none; the point is, simply, that languages do not make a statesman. Again, there is sometimes virtue in half-measures: from 'something which he did not know that he wanted' remove the first three words, and there remains quite repetition enough. "Wild in life and not wild in mind' is a repetition that is clearly called for; but it is followed by the wholly gratuitous 'fit... and fit...', and the result is disastrous. Finally, in 'who did not like..., who did not like...', mannerism gets the upper hand altogether: instead of the appearance of natural vigour that ordinarily characterizes the writer, we have stiff, lumbering artificiality.

Writers like Bagehot do not tend at all to impressive repetition: their motive is always the business-like one of lucidity, though it is sometimes lucidity run mad. Repetition of this kind, not being designed to draw the reader's attention to itself, wears much better in practice than the more pronounced types of rhetorical repetition. The latter should be used very sparingly. As the spontaneous expression of strong feeling in the writer, it is sometimes justified by circumstances: employed as a deliberate artifice to impress the reader, it is likely to be frigid, and to fail in its object; and the term 'rhetorical' should remind us in either case