An author’s style is an open window through which we can look in upon him, and estimate his character. The cunning reader reads between the lines, and finds out secrets about the writer, as if he were overhearing his soliloquies. He marks the pet phrase or epithet, draws conclusions from asseveration and emphasis, notes the half-perceptible sneer or insinuation, detects the secret misery that is veiled by a jest, and learns the writer’s idiosyncrasies even when he tries hardest to mask them. We know a passage from Sir Thomas Browne, as we know a Rembrandt or a Dürer. Macaulay is betrayed by his antitheses, and Cicero by his _esse videatur_.
Dr. Arnold has strikingly shown how we may judge of a historian by his style, his language being an infallible index to his character. “If it is very heavy and cumbrous, it indicates either a dull man or a pompous man, or at least a slow and awkward man; if it be tawdry and full of commonplaces enunciated with great solemnity, the writer is most likely a silly man; if it be highly antithetical and full of unusual expressions, or artificial ways of stating a plain thing, the writer is clearly an affected man. If it be plain and simple, always clear, but never eloquent, the writer may be a very sensible man, but is too hard and dry to be a very great man. If, on the other hand, it is always elegant, rich in illustrations, and without the relief of simple and great passages, we must admire the writer’s genius in a very high degree, but we may fear that he is too continually excited to have attained to the highest wisdom, for that is necessarily calm. In this manner the mere language of a historian will furnish us with something of a key to his mind, and will tell us, or at least give us cause to presume, in what his main strength lies, and in what he is deficient.” It has been said of Gibbon’s style that it was one in which it was impossible to speak the truth.
A writer in the “Edinburgh Review” observes that the statement that a man’s language is part of his character, holds true, not only in regard to the usage of certain shibboleths of a party, whether in religion or politics, but also in regard to a general vocabulary. “There is a school vocabulary and a college vocabulary; certain phrases brought home to astound and perplex the uninitiated, and passing now and then into general currency. In this age of examinations,--army, navy, civil-service, and middle-class,--the verb ‘to pluck’ is well-nigh incorporated with the vernacular, and must take its place in dictionaries. The sportsman Nimrod has his esoteric vocabulary, and so has likewise the angler Walton. The man of the world has his own set of phrases, understood and recognized by the fraternity; and so has the gourmand; and so also has the fancier of wines, who, in opposition to one of the laws of nature, speaks to you of wine, a fluid, as being ‘dry.’ The connoisseur in painting tells you also of ‘dryness’ in a picture, and he uses other terms which seem as if they had been invented to puzzle the uninitiated. Your favorite landscape may have ‘tones’ in it, as well as your violin. With shoulders that are ‘broad,’ and with cloth that is ‘broad’ covering those broad shoulders, you stand and observe that a painting is ‘broad.’ You sit down at dinner with a ‘delicious bit’ of venison before you on the table, and looking up see a ‘delicious bit’ of Watteau or Wouvermans before you on the wall.”