to have an obscure style, it is meant that his form obstructs his matter; that it absorbs an inordinate amount of the reader's attention. If he is tedious, it is because his language, by its monotony or redundancy, exhausts our energies, and leaves us correspondingly deficient in the mental vigor to be devoted to what he has to say.
But Mr. Spencer pushes his theory yet further. He shows, with great ingenuity, how various ornaments of style, at first sight most remote from mere utility, are in reality but devices of language which subserve the same purpose of economizing attention. Thus the canon which prefers words of Saxon to words of Latin origin, is justified by the greater familiarity of the former, recalling the associations of childhood, and their comparative brevity, which adds to their force what it diminishes from the effort required to recognize them. On the other hand, the occasional effect of polysyllabic words is attributed to their associated significance; for the effort involved in deciphering or using them, by hinting at a corresponding weightiness in the things implied, gives a force to an epithet which may do for a sentence. The same principle which explains the rules for choice of words is also found adequate to the solution of the reasons why some one order of words is more effective than another; why certain sequences of sentences are better than others; what are the respective merits of the direct and indirect style, and so forth. Then follows an analysis of the various figures of speech—metaphor, simile, and the like—in which their amenableness to the same law is established; and, finally, the applicability of the theory, even to the complex imagery of the poet, is exhibited in a passage which it would be an injustice to the writer not to quote at length:
"Passing on to a more complex application of the doctrine with which we set out, it must now be remarked that not only in the structure of sentences, and the use of figures of speech, may economy of the recipient's mental energy be assigned as the cause of force; but that in the choice and arrangement of the minor images, out of which some large thought is to be built up, we may trace the same condition to effect. To select from the sentiment, scene, or event described, those typical elements which carry many others along with them; and so, by saying a few things, but suggesting many, to abridge the description, is the secret of producing a vivid impression. An extract from Tennyson's 'Mariana' will well illustrate this:
'All day within the dreamy house
The door upon the hinges creaked,
The blue-fly sung i' the pane, the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shrieked,
Or from the crevice peered about.'
