COMPOSURE


Tribulation, Immortality, the Multitude: what remedy of composure do
these words bring for their own great disquiet! Without the remoteness
of the Latinity the thought would come too close and shake too cruelly.
In order to the sane endurance of the intimate trouble of the soul an
aloofness of language is needful. Johnson feared death. Did his noble
English control and postpone the terror? Did it keep the fear at some
courteous, deferent distance from the centre of that human heart, in the
very act of the leap and lapse of mortality? Doubtless there is in
language such an educative power. Speech is a school. Every language is
a persuasion, an induced habit, an instrument which receives the note
indeed but gives the tone. Every language imposes a quality, teaches a
temper, proposes a way, bestows a tradition: this is the tone--the
voice--of the instrument. Every language, by counter-change, replies to
the writer's touch or breath his own intention, articulate: this is his
note. Much has always been said, many things to the purpose have been
thought, of the power and the responsibility of the note. Of the
legislation and influence of the tone I have been led to think by
comparing the tranquillity of Johnson and the composure of Canning with
the stimulated and close emotion, the interior trouble, of those writers
who have entered as disciples in the school of the more Teutonic English.

For if every language be a school, more significantly and more
educatively is a part of a language a school to him who chooses that
part. Few languages offer the choice. The fact that a choice is made