What the faculty of feeling is to the artist, what the sense of proportion is to the architect, the gift of style is to the writer. Style is the witchery of words; style is clothing thought in captivating language. Style is the setting of the gem. The gem may be rare, but it needs the aid of the goldsmith's art to make the most of it. It is the skilful setting that holds up the sparkling gem to our admiration. Style is everything in writing; it makes the thoughts sparkle. Niceties of style you cannot explain by rule-of-three, nor dissect its individuality by the drastic deed of vivisection; you cannot slash the heart out of it with a critickin's reckless knife. You can unravel a piece of rare old Flemish tapestry, and destroy the beautiful design and harmonious colouring of it. In fact, you can reduce the tapestry to a heap of valueless threads of worsted fit only for burning; but style in literature you cannot pick to pieces. You cannot find the master-thread on which the secret of the pattern runs, and which reveals the cunning of the workman's craft. By some mysterious process the writer weaves words together that the chambers of our imagination may be hung with tapestries rare and pleasant to behold. No explanation of the gift of penmanship is possible. Moulding words into forms of beauty is not an achievement: it is a gift of the gods, and no handbook of literature, however diligently pursued, can turn an artisan into an artist cunning in gold-minted phrases.
When Castiglione sent the manuscript of his book, "The Perfect Courtier," to Vittoria Colonna for her approval, she replied in a flattering letter thanking the author, saying: "The subject is new and beautiful, but the excellence of the style is such that, with a sweetness never before felt, it leads us up a most pleasant and fertile slope, which we gradually ascend without perceiving that we are no longer on the level ground from which we started; and the way is so well cultivated and adorned that we scarce can tell whether Art or Nature has done most to make it fair."
It is expression that counts, and the writer who expresses himself simply, vividly, concisely, boldly, and plays upon our heart-strings at pleasure, is naturally a "gifted" man. He not only sees in clear, full vision himself, but he brings his vision home to our cloudy brains and makes us see clearly; that is the wonder of it. It needs all the art and magic and persuasion of language to accomplish this difficult task. We see the subject presented as a picture when he writes with a graphic pen; we feel poignantly when his sharp and polished periods pierce like a rapier our understanding; we are fascinated when his impassioned eloquence flows, glittering like running water in the sunlight, dazzling our bewildered brains. And when he scores by his native wit and writes in his trenchant, racy mother-tongue there is a smile in the stalls and loud laughter in the pit.
How mysteriously beauty steals into language and warms up the radiant face of poetry with glowing vitality. There is no beauty in stale prosaic sentences like "Trespassers will be prosecuted" or "Rubbish may be shot here," because they say exactly and completely all that they have to say and nothing more can be squeezed out of them. There is beauty in a sentence like "The bright day is done. And we are for the night," or "He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass," because in them, although they seem quite simple, the poet is trying to say infinitely more than he can pack into words. It is the effort to do something beyond the power of words; it is the effort to investigate the alluring Infinite with a mind closely fettered within the cramped and narrow finite that can only stretch forth a hand here and there between prison bars and touch the azure of infinitude which is the dreamland of the soul; it is this reaching out that brings beauty into language: it enflames the imagination; it ruffles the emotions; unutterable thoughts linger on the lips and fail to break away. There is a greatness in these winged words feathered with beauty because they mean a thousand times more than speaks on the surface.
When I was young the magic of words took possession of my virgin mind. The first master of language that I served under was John Ruskin. The aim of good writing is to communicate feeling; Ruskin did this intensely. The indefinable richness and power of words as they flowed from his pen, the musical and measured cadence of his prose, and the limpid clearness of his thoughts when cast on paper, placed an hypnotic spell upon me. When reading one of his books, I dwelt in dreamland. Another reading that I enjoyed with avidity in the seventies and eighties of the last century was the long literary leaders, never too long for me, in the Daily Telegraph. The best literary talent of the day wrote them. Many of them I cut out and placed in my scrap-book; alas! to be buried in decent sepulchre, for I never see them now. Lord Burnham, the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, put himself into these leaders, although other pens wrote them. They were his special hobby, and grew under his inspiration. His biographer tells us: "He had the rhetorical sense strongly developed. He liked full-blooded writing, and had a tenderness for big words and big adjectives, well-matched and in pairs. He revelled in the warmth and colour of certain words, and the more resonant they were, the better he liked them." Words carry not only meaning, but atmosphere with them. Sometimes a single word well chosen and well placed in a sentence gives feeling, and lights it up with a glow of beauty. J. A. Symonds says: "The right word used in the right place constitutes the perfection of style." In my youth a literary friend was pruning a crude essay I had written; he paused in his reading on the word "fallacious," and he said: "That's a good word and well chosen; it's the right word." It was a revelation to me at the time that one word was better than another if they both meant the same thing. On thinking it over, I saw that no two words do mean exactly the same thing, and that there is only one right word in a hundred to express exactly your meaning and to give life to it. The other ninety-and-nine words are but poor relations--nay! they are all dead corpses.
Perhaps you remember Millais' wonderfully popular picture called "Cinderella." A beautiful healthy English child, with deep dreamy eyes and long wavy golden hair sits on a stool by the kitchen fire holding in her hand a birch broom emblem of her kitchen toil. It is a fascinating picture. At home I look on a coloured print of it nearly every day of the week. The most brilliant thing on the canvas is the patch of scarlet in the dainty cap the child wears. That single dab of red seems to concentrate in itself the whole colour-scheme of the picture. It is the keynote. Now a single word in a sentence sometimes gives a startling effect. It strikes a strong, clear, ringing note which keys the writer's passing mood, fascinates us with its vividness, and sticks in the memory ever after. It is a colour-patch in literary art which dominates the picture and arrests attention, as in Shakespeare's
"Every yesterday hath lighted fools
The way to dusty death!"
Or,
"The primrose path to the eternal bonfire."
Or Pope's