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There is no need of repeating in detail what we have already considered more than once. You will remember that in our study of the elements — of words, of sentences, and of paragraphs and wholes, too we saw that the vast complexity of thought and emotion which clamors for expression by these few thousands of words that are at our disposal makes every word we use do a double work; and if every word by itself do this double work, far more must words do it in composition. In the first place, every word we use names an idea; in the second place, along with the idea it names, it suggests, with more or less distinctness, a certain number of others. What it names we say it denotes; what it suggests it connotes.

In the nature of things, these traits are not separable. The connotation of every word must cling to it as closely as in our daily life color enlivens and varies every form our eyes rest on. Take three words, woman, wife, mother, which may well apply to the same human being. Nothing could make them mean quite the same thing; nothing could deprive each of the connotation peculiarly its own. So denotation and connotation, though separate traits of the elements of style, are not separable. And we may not say that when we attend to the one we may quite disregard the other; but we may say, with a certainty that will grow with experience, that we may attend chiefly to the one.

We denote, as somebody has expressed it, what

we say; we connote what we leave unsaid. The two traits must combine in the effect that we ultimately produce; but when we write with clearness in view, when we wish so to express ourselves that first of all we shall not be misunderstood, it is one of these traits and not the other on which we should concentrate our attention. Of our words we should ask ourselves first of all what they name; of our sentences, what they mean; and so of our paragraphs and our whole compositions. I have said enough. I hope, to make this final sentence clear: the secret of clearness lies in denotation.

VII.

FORCE.

THE emotional quality of style, to which we come now, is far more subtile. In the first place, its aspects are so various that in many of the textbooks it is described not as a single quality, but as a great number of separate ones, varying literally from the ridiculous to the sublime. In order fully to understand what we are considering, then, we shall do well, before we attempt a definition, to recall various examples of the quality; to know, in a general way, what the general impression is that we wish to define.

In reading anything, or indeed in listening to any prolonged speech, we are all aware of something more than the literal facts or ideas which the words express. These general impressions, indeed, are the chief things of which in ordinary reading we are conscious. In reading "Pickwick," for example, or one of Mark Twain's better books, we can give no very distinct account of exactly what the book told us; but we are very sure that it made us laugh, and we very properly call the book humorous. The death of Colonel Newcome brings tears to the eyes of a great many people by no means lachrymose in habit; and within a very

iew years I have seen people still similarly affected by that death of Clarissa Harlowe that set all England to crying in George the Second's time. Take, almost at random, a couplet or two from Pope; these are about the poor:

"God cannot love' (says Blunt, with tearless eyes)

'The wretch he starves'- and piously denies ;
But the good Bishop, with a meeker air,

Admits, and leaves them, Providence's care."

You feel the satirical power here; it is the same quality that in a far deeper form makes "Gulliver" so terribly fascinating. Take any of the papers in the "Spectator" that deal with Sir Roger de Coverley; you will find in it a delicately well-bred humor- a sympathetic sense of what life is in some of its smaller aspects that will pretty surely delight you. In the novels of Walter Scott, in many of the tales of Mr. Stevenson, there is a very distinct trait that without analyzing we call romantic, and that many of us are still able to enjoy. In modern novels there is often a profound sense of fact which seems for the moment to give these fictions a serious and lasting significance. In writers that many of us do not pretend to understand-in Carlyle, in Browning, in Shelley -many of us feel an individuality perhaps more stimulating than if we were able to make out precisely its components. In the literature that every one admits to be great in the tragedies of Shakspere, in the nobler passages of Milton, to go no further we find a spirit that can be described by

no lesser word than sublime. One might go on interminably, recalling the enormously varied impressions that the literature we care about makes on us. If we are sensitive enough, every writer who is worth the name will make an impression peculiarly his own. If we are sensible enough, we shall enjoy, or at least try to enjoy, each of these impressions in its own way. But our business with them now is not to separate or to enjoy them; it is to realize how many and how various they are, and then to inquire what trait they have in common. For the quality of style before us -the emotional quality to which I give the name "force "includes them all.

In truth, I believe these various qualities, different as they seem, possess in common a trait more significantly characteristic than their differences. One and all, they hold the attention of a reader. Force, then, the emotional quality of style, I may define as the distinguishing quality of a style that holds the

attention.

Of course, like clearness, force is in some degree a relative quality. What will interest one man will quite fail to interest another. Mr. Darwin, you remember, could find nothing in Shakspere; and it is not improbable that many people of a literary turn would fail to find anything in the works of Mr. Darwin. And we have all heard intelligent people eagerly disputing as to whether a given book is interesting or not. I remember such a dispute last summer about a novel called "Sir Charles Danvers," which impressed