side. What is more to our purpose, a phrase or a verse in French
is easily distinguishable as comely or uncomely. There is then
another element of comeliness hitherto overlooked in this analysis:
the contents of the phrase. Each phrase in literature is built of
sounds, as each phrase in music consists of notes. One sound
suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises with another; and the art
of rightly using these concordances is the final art in literature.
It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid
alliteration; and the advice was sound, in so far as it prevented
daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and
the mere raving of those blindest of the blind who will not see.
The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends
implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel demands
to be repeated; the consonant demands to be repeated; and both cry
aloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow the adventures of a
letter through any passage that has particularly pleased you; find
it, perhaps, denied a while, to tantalise the ear; find it fired
again at you in a whole broadside; or find it pass into congenerous
sounds, one liquid or labial melting away into another. And you
will find another and much stranger circumstance. Literature is
written by and for two senses: a sort of internal ear, quick to
perceive 'unheard melodies'; and the eye, which directs the pen and
deciphers the printed phrase. Well, even as there are rhymes for
the eye, so you will find that there are assonances and
alliterations; that where an author is running the open A, deceived
by the eye and our strange English spelling, he will often show a
tenderness for the flat A; and that where he is running a
particular consonant, he will not improbably rejoice to write it
down even when it is mute or bears a different value.