Such a person “writes passionately because he feels keenly; forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too clearly to be vague; he is too serious to be otiose: he can analyze his subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces it as a whole and in parts, and therefore he is consistent; he has a firm hold of it, and therefore he is luminous. When his imagination wells up, it overflows in ornament; when his heart is touched, it thrills along his verse. He always has the right word for the right idea, and never a word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution. He expresses what all feel, but what all cannot say, and his sayings pass into proverbs among the people, and his phrases become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is tessellated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls and pavements of modern palaces.”[22]
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.”