Style, then, in the sense in which I am here using the term, implies that vital, intimate, personal relation of the man to his language by which he makes the words his own, fills them with his own quality, and gives the reader that lively sense of being in direct communication with a living, breathing, mental and spiritual force. The writer who appears to wield his language as an instrument or a tool, something exterior to himself, who makes you conscious of his vocabulary, or whose words are the garments and not the tissue of his thought, has not style in this sense. “Style,” says Schopenhauer, “is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face.” This definition is as good as any, and better than most, because it implies that identification of words with thoughts, of the man with his subject, which is the secret of a living style. Hence the man who imitates another wears a mask, as does the man who writes in a language to which he was not born.
II
It has been said that novel-writing is a much finer art in our day than it was in the time of Scott, or of Dickens and Thackeray,—finer, I think, because it is in the hands of finer-strung, more daintily equipped men; but would one dare to say it is a greater art? One may admit all that is charged about Scott’s want of style, his diffuseness and cumbrousness, and his tedious descriptions, and still justly claim for him the highest literary honors. He was a great nature, as Goethe said, and we come into vital contact with that great nature in his romances. He was not deficient in the larger art that knows how to make a bygone age live again to the imagination. He himself seems to have deprecated his “big bow-wow” style in comparison with the exquisite touches of Jane Austen. But no fineness of workmanship, no deftness of handling, can make up for the want of a large, rich, copious human endowment. I think we need to remember this when we compare unfavorably such men as Dickens and Thackeray with the cleverer artists of our own day. Scott makes up to us for his deficiencies in the matter of style by the surpassing human interest of his characters and incidents, their relations to the major currents of human life. His scenes fill the stage of history, his personages seem adequate to great events, and the whole story has a certain historic grandeur and impressiveness. There is no mistaking a great force, a great body, in literature any more than there is in the physical world; in Scott we have come upon a great river, a great lake, a great mountain, and we are more impressed by it than by the lesser bodies, though they have many more graces and prettinesses.
Frederic Harrison, in a recent address on style, is cautious in recommending the young writer to take thought of his style. Let him rather take thought of what he has to say; in turning his ideal values into the coin of current speech he will have an exercise in style. If he has no ideal values, then is literature barred to him. Let him cultivate his sensibilities; make himself, if possible, more quickly responsive to life and nature about him; let him try to see more clearly and feel more keenly, and connect his vocabulary with his most radical and spontaneous self. Style can never come from the outside,—from consciously seeking it by imitating the manner of favorite authors. It comes, if at all, like the bloom upon fruit, or the glow of health upon the cheek, from an inner essential harmony and felicity.
In a well known passage Macaulay tells what happened to Miss Burney when she began to think about her style, and fell to imitating Dr. Johnson; how she lost the “charming vivacity” and “perfectly natural unconsciousness of manner” of her youthful writings, and became modish and affected. She threw away her own style, which was a “tolerably good one,” and which might “have been improved into a very good one,” and adopted “a style in which she could attain excellence only by achieving an almost miraculous victory over nature and over habit. She could cease to be Fanny Burney; it was not so easy to become Samuel Johnson.”
It is giving too much thought to style in the more external and verbal aspects of it, which I am here considering, that leads to the confounding of style with diction, and that gives rise to the “stylist.” The stylist shows you what can be done with mere words. He is the foliage plant of the literary flower garden. An English college professor has recently exploited him in a highly wrought essay on Style. Says our professor, “The business of letters is twofold, to find words for meaning and to find meaning for words.” It strikes me that the last half of this proposition is not true of the serious writer, of the man who has something to say, but is true only of what is called the stylist, the man who has been so often described as one having nothing to say, which he says extremely well. The stylist’s main effort is a verbal one, to find meaning for words; he does not wrestle with ideas, but with terms and phrases; his thoughts are word-begotten and are often as unsubstantial as spectres and shadows.
The stylist cultivates words as the florist cultivates flowers, and a new adjective or a new collocation of terms is to him what a new chrysanthemum or a new pansy is to his brother of the forcing house. He is more an European product than an American. London and Paris abound in men who cultivate the art of expression for its own sake, who study how to combine words so as to tickle the verbal sense without much reference to the value of the idea expressed. Club and university life, excessive library culture—a sort of indoor or hothouse literary atmosphere—foster this sort of thing.
French literature can probably show more stylists than English, but the later school of British writers are not far behind in the matter of studied expression. Professor Raleigh, from whose work on style I quoted above, often writes forcibly and suggestively; but one cannot help but feel, on finishing his little volume, that it is more the work of a stylist than of a thinker. This is the opening sentence: “Style, the Latin name for an iron pen, has come to designate the art that handles, with ever fresh vitality and wary alacrity, the fluid elements of speech.” Does not one faintly scent the stylist at the start? Later on he says: “In proportion as a phrase is memorable, the words that compose it become mutually adhesive, losing for a time something of their individual scope,—bringing with them, if they be torn away too quickly, some cumbrous fragments of their recent association.” Does not the stylist stand fully confessed here? That he may avoid these “cumbrous fragments” that will stick to words when you suddenly pull them up by the roots, “a sensitive writer is often put to his shifts, and extorts, if he be fortunate, a triumph from the accident of his encumbrance.” The lust of expression, the conjuring with mere words, is evident. “He is a poor stylist,” says our professor, “who cannot beg half a dozen questions in a single epithet, or state the conclusion he would fain avoid in terms that startle the senses into clamorous revolt.”
What it is in one that starts into “clamorous revolt” at such verbal gymnastics as are shown in the following sentences I shall not try to define, but it seems to me it is something real and legitimate. “A slight technical implication, a faint tinge of archaism in the common turn of speech that you employ, and in a moment you have shaken off the mob that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a select audience of ticket holders with closed doors. A single natural phrase of peasant speech, a direct physical sense given to a word that genteel parlance authorizes readily enough in its metaphorical sense, and at a touch you have blown the roof off the drawing-room of the villa and have set its obscure inhabitants wriggling in the unaccustomed sunshine.”
Amiel says of Renan that science was his material rather than his object; his object was style. Yet Renan was not a stylist in the sense in which I am using the word. His main effort was never a verbal one, never an effort to find meaning for words; he was intent upon his subject; his style was vital in his thought, and never took on airs on its own account. You cannot in him separate the artist from the thinker, nor give either the precedence. All writers with whom literature is an art aim at style in the sense that they aim to present their subject in the most effective form,—with clearness, freshness, force. They become stylists when their thoughts wait upon their words, or when their thoughts are word-begotten. Such writers as Gibbon, De Quincey, Macaulay, have studied and elaborate styles, but in each the matter is paramount and the mind finds something solid to rest upon.