overstrained or out of place?  The phrasing may be exquisite, the thought well-knit, the emotion genuine, yet all is, as it were, dumb-show where no community of feeling exists between the speaker and his audience.  A similar false note is struck by any speaker or writer who misapprehends his position or forgets his disqualifications, by newspaper writers using language that is seemly only in one who stakes his life on his words, by preachers exceeding the license of fallibility, by moralists condemning frailty, by speculative traders deprecating frank ways of hazard, by Satan rebuking sin.

“How many things are there,” exclaims the wise Verulam, “which a man cannot, with any face or comeliness, say or do himself!  A man’s person hath many proper relations which he cannot put off.  A man cannot speak to his son but as a father; to his wife, but as a husband; to his enemy but upon terms; whereas a friend may speak as the case requires, and not as it sorteth with the person.”  The like “proper relations” govern writers, even where their audience is unknown to them.  It has often been remarked how few are the story-tellers who can introduce themselves, so much as by a passing reflection or sentiment, without a discordant effect.  The friend who saves the situation is found in one and another of the creatures of their art.

For those who must play their own part the effort to conceal themselves is of no avail.  The implicit attitude of a writer makes itself felt; an undue swelling of his subject to heroic dimensions, an unwarrantable assumption of sympathy, a tendency to truck with friends or with enemies by the way, are all possible indications of weakness, which move even the least skilled of readers to discount what is said, as they catch here and there a glimpse of the old pot-companion, or the young dandy, behind the imposing literary mask.  Strong writers are those who, with every reserve of power, seek no exhibition of strength.  It is as if language could not come by its full meaning save on the lips of those who regard it as an evil necessity.  Every word is torn from them, as from a reluctant witness.  They come to speech as to a last resort, when all other ways have failed.  The bane of a literary education is that it induces talkativeness, and an overweening confidence in words.  But those whose words are stark and terrible seem almost to despise words.

With words literature begins, and to words it must return.  Coloured by the neighbourhood of silence, solemnised by thought or steeled by action, words are still its only means of rising above words.  “Accedat verbum ad elementum,” said St. Ambrose, “et fiat sacramentum.”  So the elementary passions, pity and love, wrath and terror, are not in themselves poetical; they must be wrought upon by the word to become poetry.  In no other way can suffering be transformed to pathos, or horror reach its apotheosis in tragedy.