No law book ever was or could be written for entertainment,
and those who expect to be amused by reading Wasson or Aristotle had
better look elsewhere. His essays are like hard wood. He worked hard in
writing them and we must work also when we read them. Sometimes we meet
with passages in them of the purest, most limpid English, though these
are more common in his later than his earlier writings. He said once, "I
make no effort to please my readers, or even to obtain a graceful
diction, I only try to say what I have to in the plainest manner." There
is a decided charm in this perfect plainness, this absence of all
decoration. One likes to think how old Vanderbilt had the brass and
ornaments taken off the locomotives on the New York Central road.
Telling the truth was Wasson's business in life, and he turned neither
to the right nor the left in doing it.
However, he did not reach this philosophy at once. His earlier work is
marred slightly by a love of the grotesque, a sort of plough-boy
rhetoric, which is ill-assorted with the elevated character of his
ideas. He suffers also occasionally by an hair-splitting attempt to
prove his point beyond the possibility of contradiction. In two or three
of his essays there is an unsuccessful effort for liveliness, the result
of complaints from his magazine editors, and now and then will appear an
unconscious imitation of Carlyle; but what does it all amount to? We are
inundated now-a-days with writing that is perfect, or nearly so, in form
and yet brings no message to mankind.
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