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I intend also to demonstrate the true meaning of those Poems, which some could not perceive unless I relate it, because it is concealed under the veil of Allegory; and this it not only will give pleasure to hear, but subtle instruction, both as to the diction and as to the intention of the other writings.
When I first looked upon the house in which Hawthorne lived at Sebago, I was immediately reminded of these earlier studies in human nature, which are of so simple and quiet a diction, so wholly devoid of rhetoric, that Elizabeth Peabody thought they must be the work of his sister, and others supposed them to have been written by a Quaker.
Here, listen, and I will give you a lesson in the Myriad-Minded whom Stratford-upon-Avon blessed our little earth with." Therewith, Mac began to read from the first act of "The Tempest." Now chum was a Shakspeare enthusiast, and, withal, a very fine reader, as well as, from long study, quite pervaded with the Master's diction and style of thought.
Mr. FOX then rose, and spoke to the following purport: Sir, though the observations of the right honourable gentleman must be allowed to be ingenious, and though the eloquence with which he has delivered them, naturally excites attention and regard, yet I am obliged to declare, that I have received rather pleasure than conviction from his oratory; and that while I applaud his imagination and his diction, I cannot but conclude, that they have been employed in bestowing ornaments upon errour.
His numbers, which were elegiac, were tender, sweet, and flowing, at the same time that they occasionally rose to all the sublimity of diction which the nature of his subject required. He varied his style from the lofty to the simple, from the close to the copious, from the grave to the florid, with equal genius and judgment.
Alicia is a character of empty noise, with no resemblance to real sorrow or to natural madness. Whence, then, has Rowe his reputation? From the reasonableness and propriety of some of his scenes, from the elegance of his diction, and the suavity of his verse.
It lacks, to be sure, the grace of diction found in Gottfried von Strassburg's "Tristan und Isolde", the detailed and often magnificent descriptions of armor and dress to be met with in the epics of Hartman von Ouwe; it is wanting in the lofty philosophy of Wolfram von Eschenbach's "Parzival", and does not, as this latter, lead the reader into the realms of religious doubts and struggles.
His treatises De Inventione and Topica, the first and nearly the last of his compositions, are both on the invention of arguments, which he regards, with Aristotle, as the very foundation of the art; though he elsewhere confines the term eloquence, according to its derivation, to denote excellence of diction and delivery, to the exclusion of argumentative skill.
In seeking by main force to be expressive, to remedy his cardinal defect, to eschew whatever is trite and outworn in the line of the melody, the sequence of the harmonies, to rid himself of whatever is derivative and impersonal and undistinguished in his style, he has become over-anxious, over-meticulous of his diction.
Cato is the only Roman Stoic to whom Cicero accords the praise of real eloquence. In the dying accents of the school as we hear them in Marcus Aurelius the imperial sage counts it a thing to be thankful for that he had learnt to abstain from rhetoric, poetic, and elegance of diction. The reader however cannot help wishing that he had taken some means to diminish the crabbedness of his style.
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