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It is the real power of re-forming an opinion, which is the very opposite of that mere formlessness which we call fickleness. Nor is the comparison to such an example as St. Paul altogether historically disproportionate; for the point upon which this very typical Englishman changed his mind was a point which is now the pivot of the whole future and perhaps of the very existence of Christendom.
This plan accepted, but not to be put into execution at once, now, should in course of time have been approaching completion; and, meanwhile, the city oddly enough wavered between form and formlessness.
The complex work of Balzac unites in a curious way many of the most important elements of the old school and of the new. Alike by his vast force, his immense variety, his formlessness, his lack of critical and intellectual power, he was a Romantic; but he belonged to the future in his enormous love of prosaic detail, his materialist cast of mind, and his preoccupation with actual facts.
"In me, deep down, it all lies clear and plain and strong; but language cannot seize a mode of life that throve before language existed. If you cannot catch the picture from my thoughts, I give up the whole dream in despair." And in his written account, owing to its strange formlessness, the result was not a little bewildering.
The glow of light which showed the door of a wine-shop across the water marked where the singers were enjoying their melancholy music, which, in its formlessness and dying cadences, was in strange harmony with the shapeless undulating dark masses, which by day were rocky islands sparsely clad with trees, now only relieved by the glimmer of the paler water, whose lapping formed an undertone to the stronger notes of the voices.
It explains much of the diffuseness and formlessness of his poetry, and his inability to grasp the great truth how much the half may be greater than the whole. In spite, however, of these defects, and of the inequalities of the workmanship, The Borough was from the first a success. The poem appeared in February 1810, and went through six editions in the next six years.
One of the most reprehensible of the latter is to get into a flurry and scramble madly through a mass of facts without regard to their relation to each other. This method is characterized by breathless haste and an anxious fear lest something be missed or forgotten. Perhaps its most serious evil is its formlessness and lack of plan.
I think that even then I had an instinctive doubt whether formlessness was really better than formality. Something, it seems to me, may be contained and kept alive in formality, but in formlessness everything spills and wastes away. This is what I find the fatal defect of our American Ossian, Walt Whitman, whose way is where artistic madness lies.
Was there no depth below the shallows? Was it impossible, even by the most patient search, to discover some justification of the formlessness of the age, of the crazy instinct for ugliness? He could forgive it all, he might eventually bring his mind to believe in it, if there were only some logical design informing the disorder.
She has no continuous dramatic instinct; no sense whatever of dramatic form. These are present somehow in Wuthering Heights, in spite of its monstrous formlessness. Emily may have had no more sense of form for form's sake than Charlotte; she may have had no more dramatic instinct; but she had an instinct for the ways of human passion.
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