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Their literary excellence is due also to the fact that in the sonnet Mrs. Browning was held to a rigid form, and was obliged to curb her imagination and restrain her tendency to diffuseness of expression. Mr. Saintsbury goes so far as to say that the sonnet beginning "If thou wilt love me, let it be for naught Except for love's sake only " does not fall far short of Shakespeare.
Writing weekly for the feuilleton of a Paris daily journal, M. Sainte-Beuve cannot but be sometimes diffuse; but his diffuseness is always animated, never languid. Fluent, conversational, ever polished, he is full of happy turns and of Gallic sprightliness. When the occasion offers, he is concise, condensed even in the utterance of a principle or of a comprehensive thought.
Unless under pressing necessity, I myself will not be at pains to read what I can with difficulty understand. It is to this anxiety for full and accurate development of statements and ideas that I chiefly attribute a diffuseness with which my writing has been reproached; I have no doubt justly. I have not, however, tried to check the evil at the root.
Hornby is a little diffuse and difficult to keep to one subject; but you must be indulgent to her little failings; you would be if you had experienced such kindness and generosity from her as I have." "I am sure I should," I rejoined; "in fact, I am. After all, a little diffuseness of speech and haziness of ideas are no great faults in a generous and amiable woman of her age."
Vitruvius, however able as an architect, was a man of little general knowledge, and far from handy with his pen. His style varies between immoderate diffuseness and obscure brevity; sometimes he is barely intelligible, and he never writes with grace.
Hurst also made her a slight bow, and said he was "very glad;" but diffuseness and warmth remained for Bingley's salutation. He was full of joy and attention. The first half-hour was spent in piling up the fire, lest she should suffer from the change of room; and she removed at his desire to the other side of the fireplace, that she might be further from the door.
Thanks to modern fecundity, critics rarely molest authors with demands for the raison d'être of a new book. The reviewer's question used to be, "Why did the man publish? What need was there? What is he trying to show?" One pontiff is said to have suggested burning up all the different books in the world, except six thousand, so that the rest might be read. There used to be pleas for condensations, as if people were still fondly hoping to compass the realm of literature and science, the blessed era of hopelessness having not yet dawned. But it is idle to plead against diffuseness now, when writers are paid by the page or line. "I want," said the editor of "La Situation" to Dumas, "a story from you, entitled 'Terreur Prussienne
Here is not the mere difference, you will perceive, between ornament and simplicity, but between a diffuseness which distracts, and a condensation which concentres the attention. Chaucer has chosen out of all the rest the treachery and the secrecy as the two points most apt to impress the imagination.
His way of composing, as we learn from Gray's remarks upon his poems, was to cast down his first thoughts carelessly, and at large, and then clip them here and there at leisure. "This method," as his friend observed, "will leave behind it a laxity, a diffuseness. He might have added, that it is apt to give to poetry the air of declamation.
Vigorous, rich, brilliant, copious, they yet seldom afford a sentence which falls in perfect cadence upon the ear; under a show of regular method, they are loose and diffuse, and often have the qualities which he himself attributed to the style of John Quincy Adams, "disorderly, ill-compacted, and homely to a fault." He said of Dr. Channing, "Diffuseness is the old Adam of the pulpit.
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