Style and the Man

by Meredith Nicholson

Great writers have rarely written of style, perhaps because it is so individual, so intimate a matter; and the trick of the thing may not, except in rare cases be communicated to the tyro. The convenient methods of absent treatment advertised by correspondence schools of authorship are of no avail in the business of style; style can no more be taught than the shadows of clouds across June meadows, or the play of wind over wheat fields can be directed or influenced by the hand of man. To grasp style much is inevitably presupposed,—grammar, sensibility, taste, a feeling for color and rhythm,—of such things as these is the kingdom of style. In children we often observe an individual and distinctive way of saying things; we all have correspondents whose letters are a joy because of their vivid revelation of the writer. In every community there are persons much quoted for their wit or wisdom, whose sayings have a raciness and tang.

The bulk of English is so enormous and increases so rapidly that we have a right to pick and choose and to hang aloof from all that does not please us. The fashion changes in literary style as in clothes, and yet,—to shift the figure,—the snows of yesteryear linger on the far uplands and high peaks, and they are there forever. It is a common impression that popular taste in literature is bad and growing worse. I do not myself sympathize with this idea. The complaint smells of antiquity: every age has had its literary Jeremiahs; the wail that of making many books there is no end is older than American literature; for is it not written: “Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together and burned them before all men; and they counted the price of them and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.”

It would be instructive, if there were time, to review the labors of those who have first and last written on the subject of style. We might with profit and entertainment discuss the general superiority of English poetry to English prose; but this is a matter conceded, I believe, by sounder critics than your orator; we might linger by the golden coasts of Greece and harken to the voice of Plato who—says Frederic Harrison, alone is faultless; we might follow Cæsar’s eagles into Roman territory and hear, at the Sabine farm, Ars Poetica read by a most competent witness on this question of style. Here is a man to our liking, this Horace, and we find him eminently modern in his attitude toward the dictionary: “Mortal works must perish,” he says, who was born two thousand years ago; “much less can the honor and elegance of language be long-lived. Many words shall revive which now have fallen off; and many words which are now in esteem shall fall off, if it be the will of custom, in whose power is the decision and right and standard of language.” Other witnesses speaking many tongues crowd the door, but we must stick to our text. It is our mother English that now concerns us, and only a few may be allowed to testify at this session of the court. You will not, I pray, take my obiter dicta too seriously. I beg you to deal leniently with my stupidity when I say that such prose as Addison’s or Steele’s has little charm for me; it is, as Mr. James might say, nice; but it lacks variety, flash, ginger; and if I prefer Swift, Defoe or Carlyle to Milton, pray do not deliver me to the lions. As an advocate of the open shop in criticism I insist on my right to punch and hammer at my own bench in the corner beside yours. In thus frankly divulging my likings and aversions, I hope—to quote Doctor Johnson, that “I am not preparing for my future life either shame or repentance.” Let us assume that all the authoritative testimony on this subject is in evidence and a part of the res gestæ,—Newman on Language in “The Idea of a University”; Spencer’s “Philosophy of Style”; certain passages from George Henry Lewes’ “Principles of Success in Literature”; De Quincey’s eloquent and stimulating essay on “Style”; and discussions of the same fascinating subject by Stevenson, Pater and Frederic Harrison, and by Antoine Albalat in French,—these we file with the clerk. And not to know Professor Walter Raleigh’s essay on Style is to have missed a discussion of the subject which is in itself a model of graceful, melodious writing, guiltless of preciosity.

There must always be a difference between the style of genius and that which proceeds from ordered, controlled and directed talent. The dead level of mediocrity is easily attained in both prose and poetry, but even persons of little cultivation feel the lure of captivating speech. The world has been swayed by the power of phrase. The trumpet and drum may take hold of man’s emotions, but words only can touch his mind with truth. The words of Jesus are marvelously simple; there were undoubtedly those among his contemporaries who could contrive more splendid orations; there were citizens of the Roman empire of which he was a humble citizen who were richer in learning.

Antoine Albalat, in “The Travail of Style,” discusses in separate chapters the literary methods of such writers of supreme rank as Pascal, Bossuet, Buffon, Montesquieu, Rousseau, La Fontaine, Racine, Balzac, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo and Flaubert. And he conducts this discussion in an immensely interesting and original way, namely, by reproducing the actual manuscripts of the great writers themselves, with the countless erasures and substitutions of words, phrases and whole passages they made. What toilers, what galley slaves of the pen, they were! one cries in amazement! The first draught is as nothing. It serves simply as a point of departure, to blot, to cover with spider tracks of erasures and emendations.

“Is this the work of inspiration, this galley-slave toil at the dull mechanic pen?” demands a critic. “Yes,” the writer of the book replies. “When Buffon declared ‘Genius is but infinite capacity of patience,’ do you take him for a fool who meant to say: ‘If the veriest dolt sits long enough on a chalk egg he will hatch out a phoenix’? No, he meant that as much inspiration of genius goes into thoughtful correction and brooding revision as into the first jet of composition. When the now more fiery, more pathetic word suggests itself, it is even more a flash of inspiration than the primary suggestion of the older and poorer one.” Ah! if ever there was a book to confirm the current saying, “Easy writing makes hard reading,” it is this.

There is, as every one knows, an apparent happy luck in writing,—the curiosa felicitas that puts the inevitable word into your ink pot. I offer the suggestion that composition does not begin with the taking up of the pen; that there are untraceable sub-conscious processes that are never idle, whose results illuminate many a treasured book. He were a rash author who would attempt to set apart his conscious felicities from his inadvertent graces. How long do you suppose Shakespeare pondered that most stupendous incident in all literature—the knocking at the gate in Macbeth? Tennyson when questioned as to his own power over words once solemnly answered: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God”—implying a belief in inspiration.

Veracity is the final test in all art. It makes no difference how trifling or unimportant the thing that we would utter, or whether we express ourselves in the cadences of the symphony, in the militant splendor of the epic, in the careless fling of some vagrant poet’s tavern catch; or whether the artist writes a landscape in colors upon canvas, the test of beauty and strength is first of all the test of truth. We measure the far-shadowing spear of Achilles and weigh the gleaming sword of Arthur by the things we know to be beautiful and strong. Words may lie before us like green meadows by peaceful streams, but we must feel the softness of the turf and hear the bubble of the stream or they fail as a vehicle; or, in other departments of literature, they must sweep toward us like a cavalry charge, and we must hear the rattle of scabbards and the pounding of hoofs until we draw back struck with fear at the onset, or the artist, who is like a captain over his troop, has failed of his purpose. “My love for thee,” wrote the poet; “my love for thee shall march like armed men.”

The power of the printed word has always been tremendous; the authority of type is often excessive and unjustified; yet this only makes more exacting the inevitable standard of truth. Style will forever be challenged by truth, that austere higher critic whose method is so searching and whose judgments are so inexorable. The mere bows and ruffles, the chiffon flounces of composition are easily flung off by the literary milliner, but unless they are essential to the investiture of character they crumple and pass to the garret. It is not enough to communicate to the eye the sense of form, the outward and visible outline of a man; the shop keeper can do that with a dummy in his show-window; but words must go further and produce bone and sinew; we must be able through the writer’s magic to clasp a hand that is quick with red blood; whose contact thrills us at a touch.

This is as true in those characterizations that are the veritable creatures of realism as of those that are wrought in the mood of romance. The burden upon your romancer lies, in fact, more heavily, for in his work the spectator, the auditor, the reader, can assist him little. Silas Lapham, for example, is within the range of our common experience; what the author may omit we supply; whereas D’Artagnan rides in from a strange and unexplored land, and we must be convinced of his cleverness, his courage, his skill with the sword. When Beatrix comes down the stair to meet Esmond we must hear the rustle of her skirts, feel the fascination of her smile, and be won by the charm of her voice;—we must hear the pretty click of her slippers on the stairs. And we may say, in passing, that Thackeray carried style as an element of English fiction higher than it was ever carried before and no one since has shaken his supremacy.