Force of impact—that is another matter; that warms and quickens the mind. Browning’s “How they brought the Good News from Ghent” makes the mind hot by its rush and power. There is no mere mechanical friction of elliptical sentences and obscure allusions here.
Yes, the style that does not tire us is better than the style that does. Thus Arnold’s style is better than Walter Pater’s, because it is easier to follow; it is not so conscious of itself; it is not so obviously studied. Pater studied words; Arnold studied ideas. Pater sacrificed the more familiar democratic traits of language—ease, simplicity, flexibility, transparency—to his passion for the more choice aristocratic features,—the perfumed, the academic, the highly wrought. Again, I find Arnold’s style less fatiguing than Lowell’s, because it has more current, more continuity of thought, and is freer from concetti and mere surface sparkle. I find Swinburne’s prose more tiresome than that of any contemporary British critic, because of its inflated polysyllabic character, and his poetry more cloying than that of any other poet, because of its almost abnormal lilt and facility; it has a pathological fluidity; it seems as though, when he begins to write verse, his whole mental structure is in danger of melting down and running away in mere words. His heat is that of fever; his inspiration borders on delirium.
We never tire of Addison by reason of his style, or of Swift or of Lamb or of our own Irving or Hawthorne or Warner. It is probably as rare to find a French writer whose style tires the reader as it is to find a German whose style does not. As M. Brunetière well says, French literature is a social literature, German is philosophic, and English individualistic. It is the business of the first to be agreeable, of the second to be profound, of the third to be original. Who does not tire of Strauss sooner than of Renan, of Macaulay sooner than of Sainte-Beuve?
A writer with a pronounced, individualistic style—one full of mere mechanical difficulties, like Browning’s or Carlyle’s—runs great risk of wearying the reader and of being left behind. So far as his style degenerates into mannerism, so far is he handicapped in the race. Smoothness is not beauty, neither is roughness power; yet without a certain harmony and continuity there is neither beauty nor power. Herbert Spencer, in his essay on the Philosophy of Style, would have a writer avoid this danger of wearying his reader, by writing alternately in different styles. “To have a specific style,” he says, “is to be poor in speech.” “The perfect writer will express himself as Junius, when in the Junius frame of mind; when he feels as Lamb felt, will use a like familiar speech; and will fall into the ruggedness of Carlyle when in a Carlylean mood.” A man who should try to follow this advice would be pretty sure to be Jack-of-all-styles and master of none. What a piece of patchwork his composition would be! A “specific style” is not to be avoided; it is to be cultivated and practiced till every false note, every trace of crudeness and insincerity, is purged out of it.
The secret of good prose is a subtle quality or flavor, hard to define, like that of a good apple or a good melon, and it is as intimately bound up in the very substance and texture in the one case as in the other, and, we may add, is of as many varieties. We are sure always to get good prose from Mr. Howells and Colonel Higginson, but we are not always so sure of getting it from certain of our younger novelists.
Here is a sample of bad prose from a popular novel by a Southern writer:—
“The whole woods emerged from the divine bath of nature with the coolness, the freshness, the immortal purity of Diana united to the roseate glow and mortal tenderness of Venus, and haunted by two spirits: the chaste, unfading youth of Endymion and the dust-born warmth and eagerness of Dionysus.”
Yet the man who could permit himself the use of such inflated language as that, was capable of turning off such a passage as this:—
“Some women, in marrying, demand all and give all: with good men they are happy; with base men they are the broken-hearted. Some demand everything and give little: with weak men they are tyrants; with strong men they are the divorced. Some demand little and give all: with congenial souls they are already in heaven; with uncongenial they are soon in their graves. Some give little and demand little: they are the heartless, and they bring neither the joy of life nor the peace of death.”
That is sound prose; it is like a passage from a great classic.