A serviceable substitute for style in literature has been found in such a
collection of language ready for use as may be likened to a portable
vocabulary. It is suited to the manners of a day that has produced salad-
dressing in bottles, and many other devices for the saving of processes.
Fill me such a wallet full of 'graphic' things, of 'quaint' things and
'weird,' of 'crisp' or 'sturdy' Anglo-Saxon, of the material for 'word-
painting' (is not that the way of it?), and it will serve the turn.
Especially did the Teutonic fury fill full these common little hoards of
language. It seemed, doubtless, to the professor of the New Literature
that if anything could convince him of his own success it must be the
energy of his Teutonisms and his avoidance of languid Latin derivatives,
fit only for the pedants of the eighteenth century. Literature doubtless
is made of words. What then is needful, he seems to ask, besides a knack
of beautiful words? Unluckily for him, he has achieved, not style, but
slang. Unluckily for him, words are not style, phrases are not style.
'The man is style.' O good French language, cunning and good, that lets
me read the sentence in obverse or converse as I will! And I read it as
declaring that the whole man, the very whole of him, is his style. The
literature of a man of letters worthy the name is rooted in all his
qualities, with little fibres running invisibly into the smallest
qualities he has. He who is not a man of letters, simply is not one; it
is not too audacious a paradox to affirm that doing will not avail him
who fails in being. 'Lay your deadly doing down,' sang once some old
hymn known to Calvinists. Certain poets, a certain time ago, ransacked
the language for words full of life and beauty, made a vocabulary of
them, and out of wantonness wrote them to death. To change somewhat the
simile, they scented out a word--an earlyish word, by preference--ran it
to earth, unearthed it, dug it out, and killed it. And then their
followers bagged it. The very word that lives, 'new every morning,'
miraculously new, in the literature of a man of letters, they killed and
put into their bag. And, in like manner, the emotion that should have
caused the word is dead for those, and for those only, who abuse its
expression. For the maker of a portable vocabulary is not content to
turn his words up there: he turns up his feelings also, alphabetically or
otherwise. Wonderful how much sensibility is at hand in such round words
as the New Literature loves. Do you want a generous emotion? Pull forth
the little language. Find out moonshine, find out moonshine!
Take, as an instance, Mr. Swinburne's 'hell.' There is, I fear, no doubt
whatever that Mr. Swinburne has put his 'hell' into a vocabulary, with
the inevitable consequences to the word. And when the minor men of his
school have occasion for a 'hell' (which may very well happen to any
young man practising authorship), I must not be accused of phantasy if I
say that they put their hands into Mr. Swinburne's vocabulary and pick
it. These vocabularies are made out of vigorous and blunt language.
'What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here?' Alas, they are
homespuns from the factory, machine-made in uncostly quantities.
Obviously, power needs to make use of no such storage. The property of
power is to use phrases, whether strange or familiar, as though it
created them. But even more than lack of power is lack of humour the
cause of all the rankness and the staleness, of all the Anglo-Saxon of
commerce, of all the weary 'quaintness'--that quaintness of which one is
moved to exclaim with Cassio: 'Hither comes the bauble!' Lack of a sense
of humour betrays a man into that perpetual too-much whereby he tries to
make amends for a currency debased. No more than any other can a witty
writer dispense with a sense of humour. In his moments of sentiment the
lack is distressing; in his moments of wit it is at least perceptible. A
sense of humour cannot be always present, it may be urged. Why, no; it
is the lack of it that is--importunate. Other absences, such as the
absence of passion, the absence of delicacy, are, if grievous negatives,
still mere negatives. These qualities may or may not be there at call,
ready for a summons; we are not obliged to know; we are not momentarily
aware, unless they ought to be in action, whether their action is
possible. But want of power and want of a sense of the ridiculous: these
are lacks wherefrom there is no escaping, deficiencies that are
all-influential, defects that assert themselves, vacancies that proclaim
themselves, absences from the presence whereof there is no flying; what
other paradoxes can I adventure? Without power--no style. Without a
possible humour,--no style. The weakling has no confidence in himself to
keep him from grasping at words that he fancies hold within them the true
passions of the race, ready for the uses of his egoism. And with a sense
of humour a man will not steal from a shelf the precious treasure of the
language and put it in his pocket.