CHAPTER I. NATURE AND BEARINGS OF STYLE. I. Definition of Style. Style is manner of choosing and arranging words so as to produce determinate and intended effects in language.1 It is evident that the thought must be developed enough to contain some question of manner and effect before we can associate style with it. Bare facts could be exhibited in substantives, or formulæ, or statistics; but this would not be style; it would display no degrees of effectiveness, nor would there be any interest in it beyond the thing that is said. A work characterized by style derives equal importance from the particular manner of saying a thing: there is a fitness, a force, a felicity in the use of language which adapts the thought to the occasion, and gives it dignity and distinction. By its style the thought is made to stand out as adapted to act upon men. NOTE. To illustrate how much style may have to do with the effective presentation of a subject, compare the two following descriptions of the same thing; the one from an encyclopædia, simply giving information, the other from a romance and told in the person of an ordinary man of the people. "Avignon. The capital of the department of Vaucluse, France, situated on the east bank of the Rhone, in lat. 43° 57′ N., long. 4° 50′ E.: the Roman Avenio: called the 'Windy City' and the 'City of Bells.' It has 1 This is given as a working definition, suitable to a course of study, not as including all the literary refinements of style. The distinction, general though not absolute, between style, which centres in manner, and invention, which deals with matter, has been given above, pp. 8, 9. a large trade in madder and grain, and manufactures of silk, etc., and is the seat of an archbishopric and formerly of a university. It was a flourishing Roman town, and is celebrated as the residence of the popes 1309-77, to whom it belonged until its annexation by the French in 1791. At that time it was the scene of revolutionary outbreaks, and of reactionary atrocities in 1815. The palace of the popes is an enormous castellated pile, built during the 14th century, with battlemented towers 150 feet high and walls rising to a height of 100 feet.”1 The second account is laid at the time of the revolutionary outbreaks mentioned above. "At last I came within sight of the Pope's City. Saints in Heaven! What a beautiful town it was! Going right up two hundred feet above the bank of the river was a bare rock, steep and straight as though cut with a stonemason's chisel, on the very top of which was perched a castle with towers so big and high-twenty, thirty, forty times higher than the towers of our church- that they seemed to go right up out of sight into the clouds! It was the Palace built by the Popes; and around and below it was a piling up of houses — big, little, long, wide, of every size and shape, and all of cut stone-covering a space as big, I might say, as half way from here to Carpentras. When I saw all this I was thunderstruck. And though I still was far away from the city a strange buzzing came from it and sounded in my ears—but whether it were shouts or songs or the roll of drums or the crash of falling houses or the firing of cannon, I could not tell. Then the words of the lame old man with the hoe came back to me, and all of a sudden I felt a heavy weight on my heart. What was I going to see, what was going to happen to me in the midst of those revolutionary city folks? What could I do among themI, so utterly, utterly alone?" 2 From these examples it would appear that we must enlarge our conception of what is involved in producing effects by means of language. If it meant merely setting forth bare facts of information, then writing like the first quoted paragraph would be enough; rhetorical study would be learning to make catalogues and annals, and all excellences of style would be reducible to various kinds of painstaking. But while good writing includes this, while one of its most 1 The Century Cyclopedia of Names, s.v. imperative aims is faithful transcription of fact, it includes with this also the writer's individual sense of fact1; and this latter imparts to it the literary quality, a character and coloring due both to the intrinsic nature of the fact or thought itself and to the writer's own personality. Both of these relations of style require a few words of explication. Style and the Thought. It is a common notion among practical-minded people that the style of a literary work is an addition from without 2; as if the thought existed first by itself and then some one who could manipulate words dressed it up for effect. To them literature seems a trick and a trade, having to do with devices and ornaments of expression, or with cunning artifices of argument. This idea it is that so often weights the word rhetoric with reproach, and casts a slur on anything that is not expressed in the plainest and directest manner. But the truth is, if in good writing a thought is told plainly it is because the thought itself is plain and simple, requiring only a bare statement for its full settingforth. If another thought is told elaborately, it is because wealth of word, illustration, figure, clever phrasing and arrangement are necessary to sound its depths or be just to its subtle shadings. To a trained sense thoughts are essentially beautiful or rugged, dignified or colloquial, dry or emotional; containing therefore the potency of their own ideal expression : his aim is simply to interpret this character, whatever it is, and by making his word and phrase correspond thereto, to tell exactly and fully the truth that lies enwrapped in it." 1 The distinction adopted from PATER, Appreciations, p. 5. 3"In the highest as in the lowliest literature, then, the one indispensable beauty is, after all, truth:-truth to bare fact in the latter, as to some personal sense of fact, diverted somewhat from men's ordinary sense of it, in the former; truth there as accuracy, truth here as expression, that finest and most intimate form of truth, the vraie vérité. And what an eclectic principle this really is! employing for its one sole purpose that absolute accordance of expression to idea — all other literary beauties finery or a mere eccenFor ideally the style is It is only for purposes of study and discipline that we regard style as separable from thought. It is not, it cannot be, something added from without. Anything not required by the thought, brought in as a bit of tricity, betrays its unfitness at once. the thought, freed from crudeness and incompleteness, and presented in its intrinsic power and beauty. And the writer's effort is not directed to achieving a style, but to satisfying the demands of his subject, in order to bring out in its fulness what is essentially there. NOTE. — In the two descriptions quoted above, while both writers deal with the same basis of fact, the thought embodied in the fact, as fits in each case the object had in portraying the fact, is different. In the first the controlling thought is simply plain information; it gives numbers, measurements, statistics, in a perfectly unadorned style. In the second the controlling thought is the beauty and impressiveness of the city; it is important on that account, and on account of its part in the story; so the style is colored and heightened to correspond. Style and the Man.1. - True as it is that the style is the thought, it is equally true that the style is the man. No two persons have the same way of looking at things. Each writer imparts something of his own personality, the coloring of his spirit or his moods, to what he writes; so that the vigor of his will, the earnestness of his convictions, the grace of his fancies live again in a manner of expression that would be natural to no one else. This manner of expression moves in its individual lines of thought, begets its individual vocabulary and mould of sentence, and is in fact the incommunicable element of style. NOTE. — In the two descriptions quoted above, there is little if any suggestion of individuality in the first, because all the interest is centred and excellences whatever: how many kinds of style it covers, explains, justifies, and at the same time safeguards!"-PATER, Appreciations, p. 31. 1 "Ces choses sont hors de l'homme, le style est de l'homme même."- BUFfon, Discours de Réception à l'Académie, 1753. in the bare thought. The second is strongly colored by individuality; we read in it not only facts about Avignon, but the glowing interest of a man of the people, influenced by astonishment and awe. And if this is a feigned mood, still we see beyond it, in the author, a man of vigorous and penetrative imagination, whose clear mind realizes the vital contact of the soul with the world. It is evident, then, that a man cannot obtain a good style by imitating another man's style. It is his own peculiar sense of fact that is to be cultivated, and his own natural expression that is to fit it with words. He may indeed get from the writings of others many a valuable suggestion or inspiration for the management of his own work; he ought to be a diligent student of literature for this very purpose. He may, in common with his whole generation, obey the influence of some type of expression set by a vigorous thinker or man of letters. There are styles that he may admire and emulate, one for one quality, another for another. But any direct imitation is sure to be weak, affected, insincere. His one chance of success in style, as also his one road to originality, is to be frankly himself; having confidence in his own way of realizing truth, and developing that to its best capabilities.1 II. Adjustments of Style, and the Culture that promotes them. Three factors are to be noted as necessary in the perfect adjustment of any style, or any quality of style, to its purpose. To satisfy these is the work of skill and calculation in any particular case; these accomplish their end, however, not as labored effort but as second nature, that is, the skill is so grounded and confirmed in the writer's whole culture that the adjustment makes itself. 1" He who would write with anything worthy to be called style must first grow thoughts which are worth communicating, and then he must deliver them in his own natural language." — EARLE, English Prose, p. 347. |