Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers”—
and say of them that they are eminently Wordsworthian, that no one else could have written them, we have said the highest word for the style.
In the very largest sense style is the evolution of the characteristic; development physical and psychical is but a movement toward style. The progress from homogeneity to heterogeneity in matter; the morphological development of animate things from indefinite formless beings to definite, complex types; biological integration and specialization—all this is progress of style. Thus the most lion-like lion and the most elephantine elephant respectively achieve the highest style of animal in their kind. The development in the human race is mainly psychic, and includes psychic classes, orders, genera and species, not as yet so clearly tabulated as in general natural history. A genius is the inauguration of a new genus, style, or type of man; he is a psychic “sport,” to borrow a botanical term. A new mode of personality is achieved and may manifest itself in various ways of action, thought and emotion. If the expression is through literature a great style is generated, and this style grows with the growing individuality—the productions of youth have little style—and culminates with its culmination.
To discover style is almost as rare a gift as to achieve it. The critical sense is about as uncommon as the creative power; hence the greatest masters of style have had often to wait long for recognition, which would hardly be the case if the main value of style was in economising attention. According to this theory, we should expect the stylist to be welcomed with instant and universal appreciation, a phenomenon which rarely or never occurs. With very many writers, as with Wordsworth, recognition is very tardy, and with some only posthumous. Many readers fail even with the utmost attention to appreciate the greatest artists, and can make nothing out of them; a few rise at length to some understanding; but only rare and select spirits find themselves at once en rapport. The true connoisseur and critic must introduce and interpret to us the characteristic quality or style of the littérateur, else we may never know and feel it. Recognition and appreciation of style as the characteristic is, then, for the vast majority an acquired taste; it is slowly and painfully learned, and so the emotion for style as specific mode of expression must be pronounced a very late psychic development.
The taste and emotion for the characteristic as such, whenever and however acquired, is certainly a peculiar and definite mode of emotion. It is far from being the feeling of discipleship, and is often excited by that which is most remote and opposite to ourselves. We say of a certain person, “He is a character,” and he interests and pleases us as such, though entirely foreign to us in either sympathy or antipathy. As an entirely disinterested emotion, the æsthetic is beyond the range of common naïve consciousness. The enjoyment of the characteristic per se is specially for the analytically super-conscious cosmopolite and for the cultured critic. The pleasure comes partly from the novelty and the contrast reflectively understood, partly from admiration for the forcefulness of creative personality, its plastic power in forming its material of expression, and largely a teleologic pleasure in perceiving fulness and purity of type. The emotion for style as characteristic expression is plainly one of those which is not due to the utility in the struggle for existence, but has arisen when experience comes to be cultivated for its own sake.
When, as in eras like our own, personality weakens, and the inner plastic and creative force of conviction and emotion decreases, the writer is driven to technical treatment. The littérateur, as he has little or nothing to say, contents himself with playing tricks on language, and elaborating rhythms and cadences. Style becomes finicky; a race of prinking poetasters and priggish prosaists arise, punctiliously formal, and superlatively dainty, who attain the art of saying nothing very elegantly, elaborately, and brilliantly. An over-conscious, over-subtle technique destroys the grand style as transmitter of characteristic quality.
I trust I have, in this brief study, made it clear that the psychology of literary style is far from simple, and that a number of factors are involved, which are slighted by Herbert Spencer and others of that school. I believe that any one at all conversant with literature who will reflect upon the pleasures he receives from reading, will perceive that the pleasure of smoothness and facility, of moving along rapidly and easily, is but one, and that generally a minor factor in literary enjoyment. Beside this, he often has the pleasure of difficulties overcome, of ideas grasped, and delicate emotional touches appreciated by triumphant attentive effort. Again, he receives pleasure in perceiving literary skill, the adaptation of artistic means to the artistic end. But, as I have maintained, the chief mode of pleasure is through style as transmitter of æsthetic emotion and as expression of the characteristic, achieving its acme when both these functions are simultaneously performed most fully and perfectly.
CHAPTER XIX
ETHICAL EMOTION
The need of a closer psychological definition and interpretation of ethical emotion must be apparent to any reader of the current psychology, where we find the utmost confusion and looseness of usage. One of the most glaring instances which I have come across is this from Perez (First Three Years of Childhood, p. 286): “As soon as the child begins to obey, from fear or from habit, he enters on the possession of the moral sense; as soon as he obeys in order to be rewarded or praised or to give pleasure, he has advanced further in this possession.” A boy at table reaches out for the last piece of cake, but withdraws his hand out of love for his mother’s approbation, and fear of her disapprobation. Does this imply moral sense and emotion? We say, indeed, that these were very proper and moral emotions for the child to have; objectively moral, but we do not describe the psychical state of the child correctly by saying that it has the moral sense and emotion. In fact, just so far as he acts out of love or fear, just so far he is not acting out of ethical emotion; that is, simply because he feels he ought.