One does not know the joy of what, the music of what song, what glory; one can only gather that the woman is feeling an emotion of some kind.
Wolfe is trying to convey an emotion directly, primarily by means of adjectives. You can observe here the unsatisfactory result of having adjectives without nouns and specific content—i.e., attributes without entities. One cannot convey the quality of something without conveying what that something is.
It is a bromide among editors that bad writing can be judged by the number of adjectives used. This is not an absolute standard, but it is true that beginners often use too many adjectives. Why? Because it is the easiest and laziest method of describing something. When Wolfe wrote “joy intolerable,” “song unpronounceable,” and “glory unimaginable,” he evidently felt that if he put in three of these adjectives, they would somehow do something. Properly speaking, one would do—or ten, if each said something that contributed to the sentence.
Observe also the archaism of putting the adjective last: “joy intolerable,” “song unpronounceable,” “glory unimaginable.” This is permissible when the content warrants it (there is nothing that one can never do in writing, unless it is irrational). But here the author attempts to substitute form for content: he attempts to convey the importance of the moment by substituting the form of an exalted feeling for the content which he has not conveyed.
In style, form follows function. If you convey the content of a strong emotion, you can use as loud a form as you wish because the content will support it. Similarly, if you wonder whether an adjective is superfluous, remember that you can do anything if your content permits it. But never substitute words for meaning.
Also, the easiest thing on earth is to call something “a song” or to speak about “the music” of something, “music” always connoting strong emotion. “Love is like music” or “architecture is music” or “poetry is music”—you have seen this ad nauseam. If warranted by the content, and if done in an original manner, it is permissible to compare something to music. But do not attempt to convey exaltation simply by saying “the music of this great song.” What song?
Someone once told me that no writer should ever say “indescribable” —if it is not describable, then do not describe it. Here the author spends a whole sentence on “song unpronounceable,” “glory unimaginable.” When an author says, “This is unutterable,” he is confessing inadequacy. It can have no other meaning; unutterable to whom? An author should not intrude his personal writing problems on the reader; the reader is following the events of the story, not the mechanics of the author’s mind.
“Oh magic moment that are so perfect, unknown, and inevitable.” Why is the moment “perfect,” “unknown,” and “inevitable”? There is no reason for these adjectives, except that they vaguely suggest something exalted or important. And what is meant by “somehow we are fulfilled of you, oh time!”? The author gives us the form of a sentence but no actual meaning; he is counting only on the connotations of the words. That is improper by the rules not only of literature, but of plain grammar.
Words are means of communication and must be used for their denotation. One of the beauties of a good literary style, as opposed to a dry synopsis, is that it combines clear denotation with the skillful use of connotation. But one can connote something only in relation to something. One cannot have connotations, which are relationships, without specifying any of the entities bearing these relationships.
“Oh magic moment.” It is permissible, and can be very effective, to use the word oh as an extreme expression of a particular emotion—when justified by the content. Observe that when Hugo used it—“Oh, young girl, have pity on me!”—there was a definite reason for the exclamation; the priest was appealing for pity. Here, by contrast, Wolfe uses the word oh merely to describe an emotion.
Also, never use the word magic in a positive sense. It is a lazy writer’s word. To say that something is “magical” is too easy, just as mysticism is too easy a way out of philosophical problems. Mysticism is not at all easy psychologically, but it is, philosophically. Similarly, the word magic is not easy if you want to achieve a proper effect, but it is very easy literarily: if you do not know how to describe something, you say: “Oh, it’s magical.”
“Ah secret and alone, she thought.” The intention of this description is