In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the
sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a
deliberate shaping of all things, and from never being swept away,
whatever the emotion, into confusion or dulness. The Japanese have
numbered with heroic things courtesy at all times whatsoever, and though
a writer, who has to withdraw so much of his thought out of his life
that he may learn his craft, may find many his betters in daily
courtesy, he should never be without style, which is but high breeding
in words and in argument. He is indeed the Creator of the standards of
manners in their subtlety, for he alone can know the ancient records and
be like some mystic courtier who has stolen the keys from the girdle of
time, and can wander where it please him amid the splendours of ancient
courts.
Sometimes, it may be, he is permitted the license of cap and bell, or
even the madman's bunch of straws, but he never forgets or leaves at
home the seal and the signature. He has at all times the freedom of the
well-bred, and being bred to the tact of words can take what theme he
pleases, unlike the linen drapers, who are rightly compelled to be very
strict in their conversation. Who should be free if he were not? for
none other has a continual deliberate self-delighting happiness--style,
'the only thing that is immortal in literature,' as Sainte-Beuve has
said, a still unexpended energy, after all that the argument or the
story need, a still unbroken pleasure after the immediate end has been
accomplished--and builds this up into a most personal and wilful fire,
transfiguring words and sounds and events. It is the playing of strength
when the day's work is done, a secret between a craftsman and his craft,
and is so inseparate in his nature, that he has it most of all amid
overwhelming emotion, and in the face of death. Shakespeare's persons,
when the last darkness has gathered about them, speak out of an ecstasy
that is one half the self-surrender of sorrow, and one half the last
playing and mockery of the victorious sword, before the defeated world.
It is in the arrangement of events as in the words, and in that touch of
extravagance, of irony, of surprise, which is set there after the desire
of logic has been satisfied and all that is merely necessary
established, and that leaves one, not in the circling necessity, but
caught up into the freedom of self-delight: it is, as it were, the foam
upon the cup, the long pheasant's feather on the horse's head, the
spread peacock over the pasty. If it be very conscious, very deliberate,
as it may be in comedy, for comedy is more personal than tragedy, we
call it phantasy, perhaps even mischievous phantasy, recognising how
disturbing it is to all that drag a ball at the ankle. This joy, because
it must be always making and mastering, remains in the hands and in the
tongue of the artist, but with his eyes he enters upon a submissive,
sorrowful contemplation of the great irremediable things, and he is
known from other men by making all he handles like himself, and yet by
the unlikeness to himself of all that comes before him in a pure
contemplation. It may have been his enemy or his love or his cause that
set him dreaming, and certainly the phoenix can but open her young
wings in a flaming nest; but all hate and hope vanishes in the dream,
and if his mistress brag of the song or his enemy fear it, it is not
that either has its praise or blame, but that the twigs of the holy nest
are not easily set afire. The verses may make his mistress famous as
Helen or give a victory to his cause, not because he has been either's
servant, but because men delight to honour and to remember all that have
served contemplation. It had been easier to fight, to die even, for
Charles's house with Marvel's poem in the memory, but there is no zeal
of service that had not been an impurity in the pure soil where the
marvel grew. Timon of Athens contemplates his own end, and orders his
tomb by the beachy margent of the flood, and Cleopatra sets the asp to
her bosom, and their words move us because their sorrow is not their own
at tomb or asp, but for all men's fate. That shaping joy has kept the
sorrow pure, as it had kept it were the emotion love or hate, for the
nobleness of the Arts is in the mingling of contraries, the extremity of
sorrow, the extremity of joy, perfection of personality, the perfection
of its surrender, overflowing turbulent energy, and marmorean stillness;
and its red rose opens at the meeting of the two beams of the cross, and
at the trysting-place of mortal and immortal, time and eternity. No new
man has ever plucked that rose, or found that trysting-place, for he
could but come to the understanding of himself, to the mastery of
unlocking words after long frequenting of the great Masters, hardly
without ancestral memory of the like. Even knowledge is not enough, for
the 'recklessness' Castiglione thought necessary in good manners is
necessary in this likewise, and if a man has it not he will be gloomy,
and had better to his marketing again.