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On hearing this answer the Young Man began to curse and to swear and to say that he had looked everywhere for help and had never found it; that he was minded to live his own life and to see what would come of it; that he thought the Older Man knew nothing of what he was talking about, but was wrapping it all up in words; that he had clearly recognised in the Older Man's intolerable prolixity several cliches or ready-made phrases; that he hoped on reaching the Older Man's age he would not have been so utterly winnowed of all substance as to talk so aimlessly; and finally that he prayed God for a personal development more full of justice, of life, and of stuff than that which the Older Man appeared to have suffered or enjoyed.
The legend, of course, rose from some remarkable natural feature of the spot; as it is first told, a shadowy unreality hangs over it, and it is doubtful whether it is more than a vision of the boy; but in the later prose all is crystalline; the story is drawn out, with a barren prolixity of detail, into a series of angelic visitations.
But I must avoid prolixity, and leave the task of illustrating this by examples to the reader's own reflection.
Quizzle. You speak, governor, of the ruinous effect of prolixity in religious service. How long ought a public service continue? Wiseman. There is much discussion in the papers as to how long or short sermons and prayers ought to be. Some say a discourse ought to last thirty minutes, and others forty, and others an hour, and prayers should be three minutes long, or five, or fifteen.
The story is ashamed of its own prolixity. But how is justice to be done to the gradual evolution of a situation if hard-and-fast laws are to be laid down, restricting the number of words that its chronicler shall employ? Condemn him by all means, but admit at least that every smallest incident of the foregoing narrative had its share of influence on the future of its actors.
If in your debates with your husband you should want "eloquence to vex him," the dull prolixity of narration, joined to the complaining monotony of voice which I formerly recommended, will supply its place, and have the desired effect: Somnus will prove propitious; then, ever and anon as the soporific charm begins to work, rouse him with interrogatories, such as, "Did not you say so?
The drama even, in order to satisfy the prolixity of their nature, must take all tongues, pompous, inflated verse, loaded with imagery, and side by side with this vulgar prose; more than this, it must distort its natural style and limits, put songs, poetical devices in the discourse of courtiers and the speeches of statesmen; bring on the stage the fairy world of opera, as Middleton says, gnomes, nymphs of the land and sea, with their groves and meadows; compel the gods to descend upon the stage, and hell itself to furnish its world of marvels.
The martyrs of Lyons in the second century wrote, so to speak, their own history; for it was their comrades, eye-witnesses of their sufferings and their virtue, who gave an account of them in a long letter addressed to their friends in Asia Minor, and written with passionate sympathy and pious prolixity, but bearing all the characteristics of truth.
Barlow, "in the refinement of modern taste, censure their prolixity, and ridicule their redundancies; we may smile at their divisions, which are numberless, and at their subdivisions, which are endless; we may allow that this labor for perspicuity sometimes produced perplexity. But let us confess they always went to the bottom of whatever they embarked in.
He would write letters forty pages long to the King, and send off another courier on the same day with two or three additional despatches of identical date. Such prolixity enchanted the King, whose greediness for business epistles was insatiable. The painstaking monarch toiled, pen in hand, after his wonderful minister in vain.
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