Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

It follows from all this that there is no model style, and that the kind of style demanded in any composition depends upon the man and his theme. The first law of good writing is that it should be an expression of a man’s self,—a reflected image of his own character. If we know what the man is, we know what his style should be. If it mirrors his individuality, it is, relatively, good; if it is not a self-portraiture, it is bad, however polished its periods, or rhythmical its cadences. The graces and witcheries of expression which charm us in an original writer, offend us in a copyist. Style is sometimes, though not very happily, termed the dress of thought. It is really, as Wordsworth long ago declared, the incarnation of thought. In Greek, the same word, Logos, stands for reason and speech,—and why? Because they cannot be divided; because thought and expression are one. They each co-exist, not one with the other, but in and through the other. Not till we can separate the soul and the body, life and motion, the convex and concave of a curve, shall we be able to divorce thought from the language which only can embody it. But allowing, for the moment, that style is the verbal clothing of ideas, who but the most poverty-stricken person would think of wearing the clothes of another? It is true that there are certain general qualities, such as clearness, force, flexibility, simplicity, variety, which all good styles will alike possess, just as all good clothing will have certain qualities in common. But for all men to clothe their thoughts in the same manner would be as foolish as for a giant to array himself in the garments of a dwarf, a stout man in those of a thin, or a brunette in those of a blonde. Robert Hall, when preaching in early life at Cambridge, England, for a short time aped Dr. Johnson; but he soon saw the folly of it. “I might as well have attempted,” said he, “to dance a hornpipe in the cumbrous costume of Gog and Magog. My puny thoughts could not sustain the load of words in which I tried to clothe them.”

It is with varieties of style as with the varieties of the human face, or of the leaves of the forest; while they are obvious in their general resemblance, yet there are never two indistinguishably alike. Sometimes the differences are very slight,—so minute and subtle, as almost to defy characterization; yet, like the differences in musical styles which closely resemble each other, they are felt by the discerning reader, and so strongly that he will scarcely mistake the authorship, even on a single reading. Men of similar natures will have similar styles; but think of Waller aping the gait of Wordsworth, or Leigh Hunt that of Milton! Can any one conceive of Hooker’s style as slipshod,—of Dryden’s as feeble and obscure,—of Gibbon’s as mean and vulgar,—of Burke’s as timid and creeping,—of Carlyle’s as dainty and mincing,—of Emerson’s as diffuse and pointless,—or of Napier’s as lacking picturesqueness, verve, and fire?

There are some writers of a quiet, even temperament, whose sentences flow gently along like a stream through a level country, that hardly disturbs the stillness of the air by a sound; there are others vehement, rapid, redundant, that roll on like a mountain torrent forcing its way over all obstacles, and filling the valleys and woods with the echoes of its roar. One author, deep in one place, and shallow in another, reminds you of the Ohio, here unfordable, and there full of sand bars,—now hurrying on with rapid current, and now expanding into lovely lakes, fringed with forests and overhung with hills; another, always brimming with thought, reminds you of the Mississippi, which rolls onward the same vast volume, with no apparent diminution, from Cairo to New Orleans. “Sydney Smith, concise, brisk, and brilliant, has a manner of composition which exactly corresponds to those qualities; but how would Lord Bacon look in Smith’s sentences? How grandly the soul of Milton rolls and winds through the arches and labyrinths of his involved and magnificent diction, waking musical echoes at every new turn and variation of its progress; but how could the thought of such a light trifler as Cibber travel through so glorious a maze, without being lost or crushed in the journey? The plain, manly language of John Locke could hardly be translated into the terminology of Kant,—would look out of place in the rapid and sparkling movement of Cousin’s periods,—and would appear mean in the cadences of Dugald Stewart.”[23]

Not only has every original writer his own style, which mirrors his individuality, but the writers of every age differ from those of every other age. Joubert has well said that if the French authors of to-day were to write as men wrote in the time of Louis XIV, their style would lack truthfulness, for the French of to-day have not the same dispositions, the same opinions, the same manners. A woman who should write like Madame Sévigné would be ridiculous, because she is not Madame Sévigné. The more one’s writing smacks of his own character and of the manners of his time, the more widely must his style diverge from that of the writers who were models only because they excelled in manifesting in their works either the manners of their own age or their own character. Who would tolerate to-day a writer who should reproduce, however successfully, the stately periods of Johnson, the mellifluous lines of Pope, or the faultless but nerveless periods of Addison? The style that is to please to-day must be dense with meaning and full of color; it must be suggestive, sharp, and incisive. So far is imitation of the old masterpieces from being commendable, that, as Joubert says, good taste itself permits one to avoid imitating the best styles, for taste, even good taste, changes with manners,—“Le bon goût lui-même, en ce cas, permet qu’on s’écarte du meilleur goût, car le goût change avec les mœurs, même le bon goût.”

Let no man, then, aim at the cultivation of style for style’s sake, independently of ideas, for all such aims will result in failure. To suppose that noble or impressive language is a communicable trick of rhetoric and accent, is one of the most mischievous of fallacies. Every writer has his own ideas and feelings,—his own conceptions, judgments, discriminations, and comparisons,—which are personal, proper to himself, in the same sense that his looks, his voice, his air, his gait, and his action are personal. If he has a vulgar mind, he will write vulgarly; if he has a noble nature, he will write nobly; in every case, the beauty or ugliness of his moral countenance, the force and keenness or the feebleness of his logic, will be imaged in his language. It follows, therefore, as Ruskin says, that all the virtues of language are, in their roots, moral: it becomes accurate, if the writer desires to be true; clear, if he write with sympathy and a desire to be intelligible; powerful, if he has earnestness; pleasant, if he has a sense of rhythm and order.

This sensibility of language to the impulses and qualities of him who uses it; its flexibility in accommodating itself to all the thoughts, feelings, imaginations, and aspirations which pass within him, so as to become the faithful expression of his personality, indicating the very pulsating and throbbing of his intellect, and attending on his own inward world of thought as its very shadow; and, strangest, perhaps, the magical power it has, where thought transcends the sensuous capacities of language, to suggest the idea or mood it cannot directly convey, and to give forth an aroma which no analysis of word or expression reveals,—is one of the marvels of human speech. The writer, therefore, who is so magnetized by another’s genius that he cannot say anything in his own way, but is perpetually imitating the other’s structure of sentence and turns of expression, confesses his barrenness. The only way to make another’s style one’s own is to possess one’s self of his mind and soul. If we would reproduce his peculiarities of diction, we must first acquire the qualities that produced them. “Language,” says Goldwin Smith, “is not a musical instrument into which, if a fool breathe, it will make melody. Its tones are evoked only by the spirit of high or tender thought; and though truth is not always eloquent, real eloquence is always the glow of truth.” As Sainte-Beuve says of the plainness and brevity of Napoleon’s style,—“Prétendre imiter le precédé de diction du héros qui sut abréger Cæsar lui-même ... il convient d’avoir fait d’aussi grandes choses pour avoir le droit d’être aussi nu.”

It is not imitation, but general culture,—as another has said, the constant submission of a teachable, apprehensive mind to the influence of minds of the highest order, in daily life and books,—that brings out upon style its daintiest bloom and its richest fruitage. “So in the making of a fine singer, after the voice has been developed, and the rudiments of vocalization have been learned, farther instruction is almost of no avail. But the frequent hearing of the best music given by the best singers and instrumentalists,—the living in an atmosphere of art and literature,—will develop and perfect a vocal style in one who has the gift of song; and, for any other, all the instruction of all the musical professors that ever came out of Italy will do no more than teach an avoidance of positive errors in musical grammar.”[24]

The Cabalists believed that whoever found the mystic word for anything attained to as absolute mastery over that thing as did the robbers over the door of their cave in the Arabian tale. The converse is true of expression; for he who is thoroughly possessed of his thought becomes master of the word fitted to express it, while he who has but a half-possession of it vainly seeks to torture out of language the secret of that inspiration which should be in himself. The secret of force in writing or speaking lies not in Blair’s “Rhetoric,” or Roget’s “Thesaurus,”—not in having a copious vocabulary, or a dozen words for every idea,—but in having something that you earnestly wish to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it. Phidias, the great Athenian sculptor, said of one of his pupils that he had an inspired thumb, because the modelling clay yielded to its careless touch a grace of sweep which it refused to the utmost pains of others. So he who has thoroughly possessed himself of his thought will not have to hunt through his dictionary for apt and expressive words,—a method which is but an outside remedy for an inward defect,—but will find language eagerly obedient to him, as if every word should say,

“Bid me discourse; I will enchant thine ear,”

and fit expressions, as Milton says, “like so many nimble and airy servitors, will trip about him at command, and, in well-ordered files, fall aptly into their own places.” It was the boast of Dante that no word had ever forced him to say what he would not, though he had forced many a word to say what it would not; and so will every writer, who as vividly conceives and as deeply feels his theme, be able to conjure out of words their uttermost secret of power or pathos.