tion, certain processes of selection and organization more properly belonging to writing must be applied to it. Even the conversation in a novel cannot give merely the exact words and style of what might be called natural conversation. It must be suggestive rather than photographic, must free itself from too great a burden of interpretation of colloquial and dialect terms. The writer gives only enough of these to preserve the flavor of his conversation, not so many that the reader's attention is distracted into wonder at the fidelity of the author's observation. It is no merit in realistic writing to be more realistic than the occasion demands.

Though a familiar and easy style may be more colloquial than a serious or impassioned style, no literary style can be merely conversational. The single fact that conversation takes place among two or more persons actually present in the body, whereas literary composition is a solitary occupation carried on with the constructive aid of the imagination, is enough to distinguish the two. In the latter one summons up one's powers and bids them work under direction, and when the will to continue slackens, the work ceases. In the former each participant bears only his proportionate share of the burden and is also continually supported by the demand which the other speakers in the conversation make upon him. One must recognize therefore that the linguistic conditions in literature are different from those in speech, that the former by its nature tends to become more conscious, more reflective and selective than the latter. These differences are summed up in the statement that literature is more formal than speech. But it is so not merely by accident or by intention but by necessity.

A classic critical discussion of this aspect of style is contained in Wordsworth's Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, published in 1800, and Coleridge's comments on the Preface in the seventeenth chapter of his Biographia Literaria. Wordsworth avowed his purpose to be to relate or describe "incidents and situations from common life," throwing over them "a certain colouring of the imagination," and to do this "as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men." This language of men he confesses, however, to have "purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust."

Now as the situations and incidents of many of Wordsworth's poems were taken from very simple life, the life of shepherds and rustics, it is apparent that the purified language in which they are written and in which we now have them, must be something very different from the language really used by uneducated shepherds and rustics. Coleridge lays bare the fallacy of Wordsworth's theory when he says that "a rustic's language, purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so far reconstructed as to be made consistent with the rules of grammar. . . will not differ from the language of any other man of common sense, however learned or refined he may be, except as for the notions, which the rustic has to convey, are fewer and more indiscriminate." What Wordsworth calls purification is merely the artist's selection and rejection of detail for the purpose of securing first correctness and secondly, effectiveness in expression. The real language of men concerns him only in so far as it helps him to attain the end in view which as an artist he must keep continually

before him and by which he shall know what to retain and what to reject.

Yet it is manifestly no merit in writing to be so different from the speech of real men that the differences are continually thrust upon the reader's attention. This cautionary rule, if it needed any support beyond common sense, would find it in the writings of those word-mongers who ransack the dictionary for strange and learned words to express ideas not at all remarkable for newness or subtlety. Playing with words is a form of literary trifling. A word which one has recently acquired may seem highly expressive merely because it is unfamiliar, but the glitter of such words soon wears off. Words must be carefully sought to express the ideas for which they stand, yet if they are remotely sought and are dragged in to astonish rather than to please and inform, they are the words of a pedant, not of an artist. It is a good old piece of advice to the writer to think the thoughts of wise men but to use the words of the common people. A writer who begins to gloat over his words, to sentimentalize over them as symbols of peculiarly intimate and rich meaning, has reached a point at which he should pause and reflect that the gratification of any such private satisfaction is dearly purchased if his own pleasure is not shared by others.

The consideration of the language of literature as contrasted with the language of daily speech cannot be dismissed without some attention to the language of poetry as compared with the language of prose. Should poetry have a diction peculiar to itself? Now manifestly in so far as poetry has a mood, has ideas and feelings different from those of prose, it must have certain elements in its vocabulary which make it possible to express them.

Poetry can be written only in the language of poetry, and prose in the language of prose. But this statement, though true enough, does not really touch the question involved, which is not whether poetry should employ an appropriate vocabulary, but whether it should use words which are peculiar to itself and which therefore do not belong either to the common language or to the language of literary prose, but only to the special technical language of poetry. Such a language might be used in poetry for either of two reasons, to satisfy the metrical exigencies of the verse in which poetry is usually written, or to express more effectively the distinctive quality which makes poetry different from prose. But an exacting taste will scarcely condone departures from the common idiom because they render the mechanical manipulation of the verse more easy. When in need of an extra syllable, poets very often have used an infinitive with do or did, normally an emphatic form, instead of the unemphatic simple verb which is the general custom of the language. Thus they will say "A little flower I did see," for "I saw a little flower," if it is metrically convenient to do so. Or the archaic forms telleth, singeth may be used when the dissyllable is metrically useful, but the normal forms tells, sings when the extra syllable is not needed. The use of such artifices is a plain confession of imperfect technical command. It does violence to the sound principle in language that the forms of language are to be used for the sake of expression, not as fillers in an imperfectly realized mechanism.

But the archaic forms thou, thee, thine, and the appropriate forms of the verb in -est and -eth, and other traditional devices of poetic diction may be used less mechanically, that is, in ways more truly expressive of the spirit

of poetry, when they are employed because the spirit of poetry seems to demand them. One must again stop to inquire, however, whether poetry really demands this kind of special machinery, whether poetry is a kind of religious experience which can be expressed only in a peculiar sacred dialect. By convention, poetry might very well establish certain usages of this sort. But poets, like all other artists, must continually wage war upon the tyrannical prescriptions of convention. When a poet begins to feel that it is inescapably incumbent upon him to address his lady love as Thou art the pupil of mine eyne, when archaisms like iwis, eftsoons, in sooth, forsooth, verily, perchance, seem to him to breathe the very life of poetry, when every flower becomes a flow'ret, when cates, boons, and guerdons fill completely his poetic horizon, let him ask himself if poetry may not be expressed as well, perhaps better, in the words that are heard daily from the lips of living men and women. Strange and exotic words cannot in themselves make poetry, for the essence of poetry does not lie in fine words. On the other hand, the true poet can make the simplest and most familiar words of the language expressive of poignant poetic feeling. If that is the higher art which attains its end with the least obtrusive effort, then the poet whose vocabulary is unstrained and natural has greater skill than the one who labors under the weight of a burdensome poetic machinery.

The danger to the student of English diction of a too close adherence to the tone and to the forms of familiar speech is on the whole less insistent than one from the opposite direction. For English style, especially the style of writers in their formative stages, is much less exposed to tendencies toward the reprehensibly easy and