repetition, are denied to the writer, who must needs shoulder the
hod himself, and lay on the mortar, in ever varying patterns, with
his own trowel. This is indeed the ordeal of the master, the
canker-worm of the penny-a-liner, who, poor fellow, means nothing,
and spends his life in the vain effort to get words to do the same.
But if in this respect architecture and literature are confessed to
differ, there remains the likeness that Mr. Stevenson detects in
the building materials of the two arts, those blocks of "arbitrary
size and figure; finite and quite rigid." There is truth enough in
the comparison to make it illuminative, but he would be a rash
dialectician who should attempt to draw from it, by way of
inference, a philosophy of letters. Words are piled on words, and
bricks on bricks, but of the two you are invited to think words the
more intractable. Truly, it was a man of letters who said it,
avenging himself on his profession for the never-ending toil it
imposed, by miscalling it, with grim pleasantry, the architecture
of the nursery. Finite and quite rigid words are not, in any sense
that holds good of bricks. They move and change, they wax and
wane, they wither and burgeon; from age to age, from place to
place, from mouth to mouth, they are never at a stay. They take on
colour, intensity, and vivacity from the infection of
neighbourhood; the same word is of several shapes and diverse
imports in one and the same sentence; they depend on the building
that they compose for the very chemistry of the stuff that composes
them. The same epithet is used in the phrases "a fine day" and
"fine irony," in "fair trade" and "a fair goddess." Were different
symbols to be invented for these sundry meanings the art of
literature would perish. For words carry with them all the
meanings they have worn, and the writer shall be judged by those
that he selects for prominence in the train of his thought. A