Transcribed from the 1904 Edward Arnold edition by David Price, email [email protected]
AUTHOR OF ‘THE ENGLISH NOVEL,’ AND ‘ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, A CRITICAL ESSAY’
LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD Publisher to the India Office 1904
TABLE OF THE PRINCIPAL MATTERS CONTAINED IN THIS ESSAY
PAGE The Triumph of Letters 1 The Problem of Style 3 The Instrument and the Audience, with a Digression on the 4 Actor The Sense-Elements 8 The Functions of Sense 10 Picture 11 Melody 14 Meaning, Exampled in Negation 17 The Weapons of Thought 21 The Analogy from Architecture 23 The Analogy Rectified. The Law of Change 24 The Good Slang 27 The Bad Slang 29 Archaism 32 Romantic and Classic 36 The Palsy of Definition 39 Distinction 43 Assimilation 45 Synonyms 46 Variety of Expression 49 Variety Justified 50 Metaphor and Abstraction: Poetry and Science 55 The Doctrine of the _Mot Propre_ 61 The Instrument 65 The Audience 65 The Relation of the Author to his Audience 71 The Poet and his Audience 71 Public Caterers 77 The Cautelous Man 78 Sentimentalism and Jocularity 81 The Tripe-Seller 83 The Wag 85 Social and Rhetorical Corruptions 87 Sincerity 88 Insincerity 93 Austerity 94 The Figurative Style 98 Decoration 100 Allusiveness 102 Simplicity and Strength 104 The Paradox of Letters 107 Drama 108 Implicit Drama 111 Words Again 115 Quotation 116 Appropriation 119 The World of Words 123 The Teaching of Style 124 The Conclusion 127
STYLE, the Latin name for an iron pen, has come to designate the art that handles, with ever fresh vitality and wary alacrity, the fluid elements of speech. By a figure, obvious enough, which yet might serve for an epitome of literary method, the most rigid and simplest of instruments has lent its name to the subtlest and most flexible of arts. Thence the application of the word has been extended to arts other than literature, to the whole range of the activities of man. The fact that we use the word “style” in speaking of architecture and sculpture, painting and music, dancing, play-acting, and cricket, that we can apply it to the careful achievements of the housebreaker and the poisoner, and to the spontaneous animal movements of the limbs of man or beast, is the noblest of unconscious tributes to the faculty of letters. The pen, scratching on wax or paper, has become the symbol of all that is expressive, all that is intimate, in human nature; not only arms and arts, but man himself, has yielded to it. His living voice, with its undulations and inflexions, assisted by the mobile play of feature and an infinite variety of bodily gesture, is driven to borrow dignity from the same metaphor; the orator and the actor are fain to be judged by style. “It is most true,” says the author of _The Anatomy of Melancholy_, “_stylus virum arguit_, our style bewrays us.” Other gestures shift and change and flit, this is the ultimate and enduring revelation of personality. The actor and the orator are condemned to work evanescent effects on transitory material; the dust that they write on is blown about their graves. The sculptor and the architect deal in less perishable ware, but the stuff is recalcitrant and stubborn, and will not take the impress of all states of the soul. Morals, philosophy, and æsthetic, mood and conviction, creed and whim, habit, passion, and demonstration—what art but the art of literature admits the entrance of all these, and guards them from the suddenness of mortality? What other art gives scope to natures and dispositions so diverse, and to tastes so contrarious? Euclid and Shelley, Edmund Spenser and Herbert Spencer, King David and David Hume, are all followers of the art of letters.