COMPOSURE

Tribulation, Immortality, the Multitude:  what remedy of composure do these words bring for their own great disquiet!  Without the remoteness of the Latinity the thought would come too close and shake too cruelly.  In order to the sane endurance of the intimate trouble of the soul an aloofness of language is needful.  Johnson feared death.  Did his noble English control and postpone the terror?  Did it keep the fear at some courteous, deferent distance from the centre of that human heart, in the very act of the leap and lapse of mortality?  Doubtless there is in language such an educative power.  Speech is a school.  Every language is a persuasion, an induced habit, an instrument which receives the note indeed but gives the tone.  Every language imposes a quality, teaches a temper, proposes a way, bestows a tradition:  this is the tone—­the voice—­of the instrument.  Every language, by counterchange, returns to the writer’s touch or breath his own intention, articulate:  this is his note.  Much has always been said, many things to the purpose have been thought, of the power and the responsibility of the note.  Of the legislation and influence of the tone I have been led to think by comparing the tranquillity of Johnson and the composure of Canning with the stimulated and close emotion, the interior trouble, of those writers who have entered as disciples in the school of the more Teutonic English.

For if every language be a school, more significantly and more educatively is a part of a language a school to him who chooses that part.  Few languages offer the choice.  The fact that a choice is made implies the results and fruits of a decision.  The French author is without these.  They are of all the heritages of the English writer the most important.  He receives a language of dual derivation.  He may submit himself to either University, whither he will take his impulse and his character, where he will leave their influence, and whence he will accept their re-education.  The Frenchman has certainly a style to develop within definite limits; but he does not subject himself to suggestions tending mainly hitherwards or thitherwards, to currents of various race within one literature.  Such a choice of subjection is the singular opportunity of the Englishman.  I do not mean to ignore the necessary mingling.  Happily that mingling has been done once for all for us all.  Nay, one of the most charming things that a master of English can achieve is the repayment of the united teaching by linking their results so exquisitely in his own practice, that words of the two schools are made to meet each other with a surprise and delight that shall prove them at once gayer strangers, and sweeter companions, than the world knew they were.  Nevertheless there remains the liberty of choice as to which school of words shall have the place of honour in the great and sensitive moments of an author’s style:  which school shall be used for conspicuousness, and which for multitudinous service.  And the choice being open, the perturbation of the pulses and impulses of so many hearts quickened in thought and feeling in this day suggests to me a deliberate return to the recollectedness of the more tranquil language.  “Doubtless there is a place of peace.”