2. The second, quoted from Lowell's "Fireside Travels," deals indeed with a simple thought, but notice how much the author's mind adds to it from its own resources, in play of fancy, figurative suggestiveness, quotation, allusion, so that the idea is enriched by the sparkle and play of many associated ideas:

"When our dinner came, and with it a flask of drowsy red Aleatico, like ink with a suspicion of life-blood in it, such as one might fancy Shakespeare to have dipped his quill in, we had our table so placed that the satisfaction of our hunger might be dissensualized by the view from the windows. Many a glutton has eaten up farms and woodlands and pastures, and so did we, æsthetically, saucing our frittata and flavoring our Aleatico with landscape. It is a fine thing when we can accustom our animal appetites to good society, when body and soul (like master and servant in an Arab tent) sit down together at the same board. This thought is forced upon one very often in Italy, as one picnics in enchanted spots, where Imagination and Fancy play the parts of the unseen waiters in the fairy-story, and serve us with course after course of their ethereal dishes. Sense is satisfied with less and simpler food when sense and spirit are fed together, and the feast of the loaves and fishes is spread for us anew. If it be important for a state to educate its lower classes, so is it for us personally to instruct, elevate, and refine our senses, the lower classes of our private body-politic, and which, if left to their own brute instincts, will disorder or destroy the whole commonwealth with flaming insurrection."

Between these two opposite poles of expression lies the broad and diversified domain of literary style.

Among practical people there is sometimes a disposition to decry any endeavor after style, and along with it any study of rhetoric, as if all had to do only with tricks and subtleties of expression, or with cunning artifices of logic. Plain and direct statement, without art, is the favorite plea of such people; like the Franklin in the Canterbury Tales, they take for granted that common speech is excluded from the province of rhetoric:

"At my bigynnyng first I yow biseche,
Have me excused of my rude speche.

I lerned nevere rethorik certeyn;

Thyng that I speke it moot be bare and pleyn."

This plea merely betrays a wrong idea of what style is. Plainness and directness, even bareness of statement, belong, in their place, as truly to style as does elegance; indeed, these apparently simpler

"To press to the

qualities are often the most difficult to obtain. sense of the thing itself with which one is dealing," says Matthew Arnold, "not to go off on some collateral issue about the thing, is the hardest matter in the world." The criterion of a style is furnished first of all by the requirements of the subject-matter. While the expression of some ideas may stop with plainness, other ideas must take higher qualities. Some thoughts are essentially beautiful or subtle, and scorn a bald and rudimentary statement; others are in their nature rugged or ponderous or incisive, and the force of the expression must correspond. Style is just the skillful adaptation of expression to thought.

That manner of expression is all-important is shown by those literary works that survive their age and become classic. The productions that take their place among the world's undying treasures of literature are invariably and exclusively such as possess eminent merits of style. All others, though they deal with the same thought, are, so to say, melted back into the bullion of rudimental ideas, until their thought, masterfully expressed, is fitted to live.

While, however, we speak of thought and expression as two things, it is to be remembered that style is not to be regarded as separable from the thought. It is not, and cannot be, something added from without. Any such thing brought in as a finery, or a mere device, betrays its unfitness at once. If it is not required by the thought, it does not rightly belong to the style. For the style is the thought, freed from crudeness and incompleteness, and presented in its intrinsic power and beauty. And the writer's supreme effort is directed, not so much to the qualities of style in themselves, as to the demands of his subject, in order to bring out in its fullness what is essentially there.

How far Style is Communicable. - 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 to what he writes; so that the vigor of his activities, 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. His style is the mirror of his mind and character. Thus there is an individuality in every man's style which is incommunicable. The grace and power of it can be felt and interpreted, but it cannot well be imitated, or at least any imitation is sure to be weak and insincere. An author's peculiar manner may furnish valuable suggestions, by which others may improve their own style; a vigorous thinker may even set a pattern of writing for his generation, and thus materially influence the general style of his age;1 but yet, beyond all this, every man who would write with power must seek his own natural expression, must be himself, in an individuality as incommunicable as he sees in the work of others.

But while the personal qualities are incommunicable, there are features of style that may be taught and acquired, being largely a matter of discipline and care. Such are the grammatical and logical principles of expression. Not every one can learn to write in a masterly style; but every one can learn to write honestly, can clear his language of ambiguities and inconsistencies, can unlearn false and vulgar tastes. Every one can form the habit of weighing words and constructions, and of making his thought direct and definite. These are lower qualities of style, it is true; but they are fundamental, and indispensable to the higher. And when one has acquired these, he has at least the medium of useful expression, which all need, and which is all that most people have occasion for.

The impersonal features of style, such as are developed from grammar and logic, it is within the province of a text-book to teach. Accordingly such a manual as the present concerns itself with the shaping of language to thought, and with pointing out the value and use of the various resources of expression, from the choice of words up to the construction of an entire discourse. In so doing it may also give counsel regarding literary habits and methods in

1 Of the writers of this century, Macaulay is perhaps the most remarkable illustration of this fact. More than can well be estimated, the current style of writing, especially in journalistic and periodical literature, has profited in crispness and interest, since he first gave to the world his vigorous and pointed sentences.

general, may show the writer how to educate his thinking powers, may put him in the way to develop a pure taste. Such is the task recognized in the present course of rhetorical study.

II.

What Adaptations of Style are Essential. Three factors are to be noted as necessary in the perfect adaptation 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, but also it depends fully as much on the writer's general culture.

1. The writer needs to have a just feeling of the relation between style and thought. Just as there are different planes of thinking, so there are different levels of style. Some thought is common and homely, and any attempt to dress it up in splendor of language makes it appear tawdry. Some thought, and the expression given to it, needs to be severe, sententious, precise. Other thought there is that requires all the resources of fancy and imagery that can be employed. The nature of the thought is indeed the first dictator of the style; but to obey its dictates unerringly, and make manner answer perfectly to matter, is the result of no little skill.

The perfect adjustment of style to thought depends mainly on a matured and educated taste. Such taste is developed by familiarity with the usage of the best writers, and by watchful care over one's own speech. By his daily habits of reading and conversation, if they are rightly regulated, one may form almost insensibly a literary instinct, which enables him to detect at once a false note in expression; he feels when a word adds a real poetic touch, and when it is only tinsel; or when a prosaic word flats the tone of an impassioned passage; or when a colloquialism impairs the dignity of a severe and elevated thought.

2. The writer needs to recognize the relation of the style to the reader. Most truths belong to all men, and need to be expressed in a style that may be understood by all; but some, which are technical and belong only to a class, may on occasion be expressed in the language of that class. Thinking readers take special pleas

ure in severe and precise expression; imaginative readers look for and value the graces of style; cursory readers may be arrested by a flavor of wit and pungency, or by the confidential tone of a conversational manner. All such things the writer must remember, and seek to adapt his work to the capacities and powers of his readers. The fault is often mentioned of an orator's speaking over the heads of his audience: the complaint means that he is too inflexible in his individual ways of thinking and does not simplify for the needs of others than himself.

The writer cannot easily go astray in seeking to adapt his words to minds of ordinary capacity; and this he may the more safely do because, while the unlearned require plainness of speech, the truly cultured are the last to despise simplicity. To effect such adaptation, leading authors have found it of great advantage to write as in the presence of an audience, to imagine themselves conversing with a person of average intelligence, who must be made to appreciate the thought according to its nature. This is indeed the truest and simplest basis of discourse, - to write as one would speak.

3. The writer needs to make his style adequately represent himself. By this is meant that he is to present his ideas and convictions fully and naturally, without disadvantage from an imperfectly mastered medium of communication. The ability to do this is by no means the easy matter it seems. The writer may be glowing with the beauty or importance of a truth, and yet his attempt to express it may result, with his best efforts, only in frigid and stilted language. He may in conversation be perfectly fluent and natural, and yet write a pedantic or lifeless style.' The fault lies in imperfect or insufficient training. His power over expression needs to be so developed by culture, needs to become so truly a second nature, that his written words may be a spontaneous, undimmed reflection of his mind's working. Until such mastery is attained, his style disguises, not represents, himself.

1 "Tom Birch is as brisk as a bee in conversation; but no sooner does he take a pen in his hand, than it becomes a torpedo to him, and benumbs all his faculties," - Remark attributed to Dr. Johnson, Boswell's Life.