[In the following excerpt, Mackenzie analyzes Miller's prose style and the literary models that influenced his development as a writer.]

So far, then, have we been able to follow Miller in the careful training of himself for literary achievement. Without exactly playing “the sedulous ape,” he studies closely the general form, the tones and turns of expression characterising a well-defined group of writers, and shapes his own performance accordingly. It need not, therefore, be pronounced either futile or pedantic to endeavour to trace out more closely some of the affinities of Miller's style with the materials he so used. No analysis, indeed, can cumulatively explain the total result: style is a compound, not a mere literary mixture. Short of that, however, we can surely work to fuller knowledge and a clearer definition of the constituents, and so open the way to a keener appreciation of the whole.

Happily Miller has left us in no doubt as to his models and standards. He is confessedly of the Augustans, the men of Queen Anne's time, and the prose-writers who derived from them. He did not make literature of the vernacular as Burns did; that was possible only for a poet. He sought his models where every educated Scotsman did till the time of the Carlyle fashion, and was the last notable exponent in a dying mode. When Baron Hume declared that he excelled in “that classical style” with which his contemporaries had lost touch, Hugh modestly explained that he owed the merit “chiefly to accident; to having kept company with the older English writers—the Addisons, Popes, and Robertsons of the last century.” And he goes on to say, “the tone of these earlier writers I have, I daresay, contrived in some measure to catch.” The selection here is evidently summary, and the list may be easily extended by further testimony, both circumstantial and explicit.

Thus Miller's prose taken generally, is of the “middle style,” the peculiar achievement of the eighteenth century writers, “familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious”—Johnson's characterisation—which, if it never rises to the convoluted sublimity of the earlier men, never, on the other hand, sinks to the commonplace of colloquialism. It cannot be held that it is a style capable of the effects which have been drawn in modern times from a critical return to more archaic sources; but then, on the other hand, it is not, for ordinary purposes, so dangerous a medium, nor does it run such a risk of affectation and painful artificiality. For use in scientific exposition its fitness is unquestionable.

Miller had an early and close acquaintance with the Spectator papers. After their manner the unborn Egotist was conceived. Plainly his notion of “correctness” meant to a large degree a following of Addison whom he “had known so long, and, in his true poems, his prose ones, had loved so much.” But his more serious range of subjects, and his more serious and direct treatment of them, were bound to react upon his forms of expression. It is with Addison in his graver moods that he has most in common. It is probably, in the main, owing to his influence that Miller's prose is predominantly loose rather than periodic. The following sentences, for example, where the main thought is stated at the outset, and the rest is attached as elaboration or development, are typical:—“The moon, nearly at full, was riding high overhead in a troubled sky, pouring its light by fits, as the clouds passed, on the grey ruins, and the mossy, tilt-like hillocks, which had been raised ages before over the beds of the sleepers. The deep, dark shadows of the tombs seemed stamped upon the sward, forming, as one might imagine, a kind of general epitaph upon the dead, but inscribed, like the handwriting on the wall, in the characters of a strange tongue.”

But while Miller thus far resembles Addison, he does so with a difference. His sentences are more closely and correctly compacted; probably he owed this feature to the example of precisian purity in the Scotch writers of whom Robertson, mentioned above, is one. Rarely indeed does he get caught, as Addison was so often, in the peculiar fault of the loose style, a huddling together of explanatory clauses, or a careless arrangement with an incongruous result. He is also much more metaphorical in language. Intermittently, indeed, we have short lyric-like embellishments, the graftings of a poetic fancy—Spencer grants him “a large amount of poetry”—on the stouter stem of prose. Where Addison seeks a pathetic relief in Orientalised or barbaric imaginings, Miller supplies it direct from natural impressions or homely reflection. The free use of metaphor, too, on the part of the disciple results in a more vivid, if less insinuating effect. His prose is felt in consequence to have more “blood and juice.”

Nor is there anything of the “gentle satirist”: indeed it is but a Thackerayan hallucination with respect to Addison, whose satire has more conspicuously the note of cynical malice, daintily as it is disguised. But this was foreign to Miller's nature. If he dislikes a man or an opinion, he says so, with literary grace and satiric phrase it may be, but at least with no ambiguity. Setting aside his occasional viciousness, and lack of humorous toleration towards men and things outwith his sympathies, we may, for continuous ease and grace of diction, compare Miller more closely with Goldsmith than with any other. From Goldsmith he illustrates and quotes with exceptional frequency, especially in his earlier works where such influences as we have been considering will, naturally, be more apparent. Many passages indeed, in their balanced rhythm and sententious movement, almost seem modelled on analogous trains of thought from the earlier writer's pen.

Ultimately it is possible to trace this balanced, antithetical fashion to the judicial Johnson, whose customary syntactical suit it had become. There is occasionally, too, in Miller something of the Johnsonian rotundity of phrase, of which the neatest example is his turning out a familiar saying in the form, “Absence, though it rather strengthens than diminishes a true attachment,” etc. We note the same ponderous influence in the way in which our author, though as careful of his transitions and culminations as a De Quincey could have wished, approaches detail over the shoulder of some comprehensive principle thereby to be illustrated or concretely embodied. The second letter on the Herring Fishery in the Moray Firth (1829) opens thus: “Dr Currie, the elegant and philosophical biographer of Burns, has remarked that knowledge, which some have defined to be power and others happiness, may with safety be considered as motion. He has said that it raises men to an eminence from whence they take within the sphere of their vision a large portion of the globe, and discover advantage at a great distance on its surface.” And thus loftily we are introduced to a narrative of how the Cromarty fishermen, suffering from the failure of the fishing in their own firth, turned to account what they were hearing of its success at Wick by sailing thither to participate. The trick is, of course, older than Johnson; may in fact be dubbed the “classical” or grand style of literary attack; and was in form congenial to Miller's thought procedure. But it was the “great moralist” who gave it vogue as a literary pattern. It is allied with a grandiose style of reference to authors as the “learned,” the “philosophical,” the “ingenious” and so forth. In Miller's case, however, the sharpness of controversy and the practice of the inductive method in science, gradually filed down these formalisms very considerably.

Miller has been specifically praised for his descriptive powers. In landscape his success seems to be due to a certain architectural power, careful selection of detail and the elegance of language in which the whole is presented. But he does not paint on such a large canvas as Carlyle, nor with such interpretative insight. In fact his general method may be reduced to a simple formula. There is first a broad mapping out of his subject with the eye of the builder and geologist—the geological structure of landscape he rightly held should be studied with as much care by the painter as the anatomical structure of the body—then a dabbing in of the bolder colours, directed usually again by the geological interest, since “The colouring of the landscape is well-nigh as intimately connected with its geology as the drawing”; and finally a filling in of striking features clearly located or merely picturesquely grouped. Emphasis upon one or other of these essentials gives variety to the general method.

A fondness for colour indeed distinguishes most of Miller's landscapes. As a young man he had practised painting, and the highly varied programme of his purposes at twenty-six includes quite a number of contemplated pictures. A similar descriptive tendency was remarked by Ruskin of Sir Walter Scott. Thus, for Miller, the southern shore of the Moray Firth with its numerous little towns is “a belt of purple speckled with pearls.” This characteristic touch may be exemplified from almost any relevant portion of his work. The practice was deliberately cultivated for geological reasons.

In the following it is almost absent, while we have, however, a favourable instance of the other qualities remarked upon. Moreover, such success with valley portraiture is rare in literature. We are looking at Shenstone's Leasowes. Attention is first fixed on a hill of the Lower Coal Measures, a “huge blister of millstone grit. … Let the reader imagine it of soft, swelling outline, and ample base, with the singularly picturesque trap range full in front, some four miles away, and a fair rural valley lying between. Let him further imagine the side hill furrowed by a transverse valley, opening at right angles into the great front valley, and separating a-top into two forks, or branches, that run up, shallowing as they go, to near the hill-top. Let him, in short, imagine this great valley a broad right line, and the transverse forked valley a gigantic letter Y resting on it. And the forked valley on the hill-side—this gigantic letter Y—is the Leasowes. The picturesqueness of such a position can be easily appreciated. The forked valley, from head to gorge, is a reclining valley, partaking along its bottom of the slope of the eminence on which it lies, and thus possessing, what is by no means common among the valleys of England, true downhill water-courses, along which the gathered waters may leap in a chain of cascades; and commanding in its upper recesses, though embraced and sheltered on every side by the surrounding hill, extending prospects to the country below. It thus continues the scenic advantages of both hollow and rising ground—the quiet seclusion of the one, and the expansive landscapes of the other. The broad valley into which it opens is rich and well wooded. Just in front of the opening we see a fine sheet of water, about twenty acres in extent, the work of the monks; immediately to the right stand the ruins of the abbey; immediately to the left, the pretty, compact town of Hales Owen lies grouped around its fine old church and spire; a range of green, swelling eminences rises beyond; beyond these, fainter in the distance, and considerably bolder in the outline, ascends the loftier range of the trap hills—one of the number roughened by the tufted woods, and crowned by the obelisk at Hagley; and, over all, blue and shadowy on the far horizon, sweeps the undulating line of the mountains of Cambria.”

What we, trained in a later school, miss in such descriptions is the human interest. There is no attempt to connect the external manifestations with the springs of emotion in the way Carlyle, even in a phrase, could do so happily; as of St Edmondsbury “looking out right pleasantly, from its hill-slope, towards the rising sun.” Admirably perceived and represented though they are, Miller's pictures usually leave us cold, and unaffected by any feelings other than those of interest and admiration. They, too often, as in the present case, lack individuality of impression; so that corner of country must have looked to any intelligent observer, albeit ungifted to describe and group its features in orderly sequence.

Miller himself speaks of his elaborate description of the Leasowes rather deprecatingly as simply “hard anatomy.” These asides of “self-criticism” are never astray. But with his limited resources he is scarcely able to escape such a result. Colour which he uses so freely elsewhere as a relief is here practically absent; then his landscapes are always as we have noted—as was also the case with Scott—absolutely objective and divorced from the personal impression; while the only bit of his technique so far not referred to is the atmospheric, which is curiously confined to the effects of a rich sunset—in the present instance not permissible. The result, as he perceives, is a certain hardness, which indeed, in some degree, is a quality of all his landscape work.

The same lack of sympathetic insight is felt in his personal portraits. Individual externals are keenly discerned and clearly reproduced. “Click-clack was a rough-looking fellow, turned of forty, of about five feet ten, with a black, unshaven beard, like a shoe-brush stuck under his nose, which was red as a coal, and attired in a sadly-breached suit of Aberdeen grey, topped by a brimless hat, that had been borrowed, apparently, from some obliging scarecrow.” This much, vivid and exact, our author can do by skilful choice and arrangement of material. But all through the sketch we feel that the note of “inwardness” is wanting, only to be supplied indeed by that neutral humour which Miller, whose fun is usually rather grim, did not possess. There is, in consequence, a defect of sympathy, the place of which is taken by strong ethical and religious prejudices, narrowly limiting his treatment of character. Humour of narration he certainly has, where the matter is indifferent or of slight importance. But character and conduct are always for Miller too serious things to be treated otherwise than at the bar of judgment. The result is sentence or sentimentalism. This defect is less apparent where his method gets a freer field in the admirable reconstructions from tradition “of a bygone state of society” in a little Scotch town. It is most palpable in his tales, where it is the chief reason for that lack of dramatic power, noted by Mr Carruthers with respect to Scenes and Legends, and referred to by Mrs Miller in her preface to Tales and Sketches. It is for this reason that so many of these stop short of only the highest excellence.

As for the use he makes of the “red” glow of the setting sun, it is so frequent as to become a mannerism. Scores of examples might be cited. Proximately it may be due to a morbid fondness for lonely evening walks in lugubrious places; but the fact that his imaginary meetings with Ferguson and Burns also take place in romantic situations, “fronting the setting sun,” and “in strong red light,” respectively, suggests for such a predilection a sentimental basis.

The power of grasping and grouping detail was particularly useful to the geologist. The clearness and effectiveness of his scientific exposition have always been recognised for a distinction as meritorious as it is rare. Subordinately, of course, it is further due to a readiness in concrete familiar illustration. The flattered head of Cephalaspis is like “a saddler's cutting-knife”; the markings on the mail covering of Osteolepis “lie as thickly as the circular perforations in a lace veil”; the dorsal fins of Cheiracanthus are like “two lug-sails stiffly extended.” Viewed from the Cromarty Firth, the “lofty promontory” of the Black Isle resembles “a huge spear thrust horizontally into the sea, a ponderous mass of granitic gneiss, of about a mile in length, forming the head, and a rectilinear line of the Old Red Sandstone, more than ten miles in length, forming the shaft.” This aptness of homely and pungent illustration at times, it is true, but forged fetters for the mind. He was determined, as we shall see, to have the central nucleus of the Highlands set in a “frame” of Old Red Sandstone, and he fought to the end against surrendering his besetting simile.

But while the details are thus picturesquely conceived, his powerful handling of them seems due to that synoptic habit of mind which we have already noticed as a feature of his literary method. He confesses himself “altogether deficient in the cleverness that can promptly master isolated details, when in ignorance of their bearing on the general scheme to which they belong.” This remark, applicable all round, has place in an account of how he finally mastered book-keeping as a bank clerk. It is the secret of his power of scientific exposition.

Summarily Miller's style may be truthfully said to answer to Arnold's quasi-definition of the “classical” as “perfect in lucidity, measure, and propriety.” But I cannot conceive how Bayne¹ can speak of it as “artless,” or Sir Henry Craik (English Prose, vol. v.) as “natural,” or, least of all, Mr M^cCarthy as “spontaneous” (History of Our Own Time, iv. 229). As a style it is, as we have seen, highly figurative and allusive; the transitions and openings are carefully managed; the total effect, without verbosity, is melodious in a high degree. This last, again, is a strong Addisonian note. But Miller was a most laborious writer. He corrected and corrected again. “Chalmers remarked of him that, when he did go off, he was a great gun, and the reverberation of his shot was long audible, but he required a deal of time to load” (Bayne). Never was a style—easy to read, however hard in the writing, graceful and perspicuous—less the man, solidly and largely built, inelegant of dress and gait, and of mental habit laborious and comprehensive; whose speech, too, was not the “undefiled English” he wrote, but the “Cromarty Scotch,” with a vowel system exemplified in the utterance, “the exe hed been bussy in the gleds.” Dr M^cCosh records that in conversation “his thoughts came out tumbling with a freshness, an originality, and a power, which somewhat disappeared” in his formally written work. As a journalist, again, he took several proofs; while the crowning test was a viva-voce reading. He had no ear for pitch—was quite unmusical, in fact—but possessed a splendid perception of rhythm. To this quality he obviously attached supreme importance, presumably for Plato's reason that “rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten.” He avoids all harsh collocations of words and syllables, and in this endeavour his vocabulary never seems to fail him. The unbroken melody is apt to cloy; one misses the sure idiomatic grip, unattainable by Scotch writers primly handling their English as they would a foreign tongue; our later prose has become more daring and changeful in experiment. But for calm, polished excellence, for the dry light of the courtly Augustan utterance refracted through the rich mind of a parochial genius, Miller's prose work is eminently worthy of a niche in the literary temple. That was his earliest and his ever dominant ambition, and he would be a captious, clannish critic indeed who could raise his voice in dissent.

The Poems of a Journeyman Mason present a striking contrast to his prose. The two possess scarcely a feature in common. The poems have but rarely any imaginative interest, and sink under a weight of moral judgment and religious profession. Cold print unsealed Miller's eyes to their defects. He published them in a fit of pique at editorial neglect—“It would have been a greatly wiser act … had I put them into the fire instead.” His narrow conception of poetic value may be judged from the pronouncement that Byron, Ovid, and Moore “fearfully misused the talents that God gave them”; and that “the Langhorns, Wartons, Kirke-Whites, Shelleys, Keatses—shall I venture to say it?—Byrons” (mark the grouping), “are flowers of the spring, to be read in careless youth if there is to be any appreciation!” The epilogue to the book of verse is apologetic—the serious pieces are recommended for their seriousness, while the lighter pieces, “though wild and fanciful, are not immoral.” Not thus, however, is the volume to be saved from the aesthetic judgment, which may be expressed in one of his own lines: “O, it is drear, fearfully drear.” Plainly Miller was right when he decided that for his type of thinking “the accomplishment of verse was too narrow.” Carlyle and Ruskin, minds cast in the same mould, had to learn the same lesson.

Note

1. Peter Bayne in Life and Letters of Hugh Miller, which is referred to throughout.