I
The difference between a precious stone and a common stone is not an
essential difference--not a difference of substance, but of arrangement
of the particles--the crystallization. In substance charcoal and the
diamond are one, but in form and effect how widely they differ. The
pearl contains nothing that is not found in the coarsest oyster shell.
Two men have the same thoughts; they use about the same words in
expressing them; yet with one the product is real literature, with the
other it is a platitude.
The difference is all in the presentation; a finer and more compendious
process has gone on in the one case than in the other. The elements
are better fused and welded together; they are in some way heightened
and intensified. Is not here a clue to what we mean by style? Style
transforms common quartz into an Egyptian pebble. We are apt to think
of style as something external, that can be put on, something in and of
itself. But it is not; it is in the inmost texture of the substance.
Choice words, faultless rhetoric, polished periods, are only the
accidents of style. Indeed, perfect workmanship is one thing; style,
as the great writers have it, is quite another. It may, and often
does, go with faulty workmanship. It is the use of words in a fresh
and vital way, so as to give us a vivid sense of a new spiritual force
and personality. In the best work the style is found and hidden in the
matter.
If a writer does not bring a new thought, he must at least bring a new
quality,--he must give a fresh, new flavor to the old thoughts. Style
or quality will keep a man’s work alive whose thought is essentially
commonplace, as is the case with Addison; and Arnold justly observes of
the poet Gray that his gift of style doubles his force and “raises him
to a rank beyond what his natural richness and power seem to warrant.”
There is the correct, conventional, respectable and scholarly use of
language of the mass of writers, and there is the fresh, stimulating,
quickening use of it of the man of genius. How apt and racy and telling
is often the language of unlettered persons; the born writer carries
this same gift into a higher sphere. There is a passage in one of
Emerson’s early letters, written when he was but twenty-four, and given
by Mr. Cabot in his Memoir, which shows how clearly at that age Emerson
discerned the secret of good writing and good preaching.
“I preach half of every Sunday. When I attended church on the other
half of a Sunday, and the image in the pulpit was all of clay, and
not of tunable metal, I said to myself that if men would avoid that
general language and general manner in which they strive to hide
all that is peculiar, and would say only what is uppermost in their
own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be
interesting.... But whatever properties a man of narrow intellect feels
to be peculiar he studiously hides; he is ashamed or afraid of himself,
and all his communications to men are unskillful plagiarisms from the
common stock of thought and knowledge, and he is of course flat and
tiresome.”
The great mass of the writing and sermonizing of any age is of the kind
here indicated; it is the result of the machinery of culture and of
books and the schools put into successful operation. But now and then
a man appears whose writing is vital; his page may be homely, but it
is alive; it is full of personal magnetism. The writer does not merely
give us what he thinks or knows; he gives us himself. There is nothing
secondary or artificial between himself and his reader. It is books
of this kind that mankind does not willingly let die. Some minds are
like an open fire,--how direct and instant our communication with them;
how they interest us; there are no screens or disguises; we see and
feel the vital play of their thought; we are face to face with their
spirits. Indeed all good literature, whether poetry or prose, is the
open fire; there is directness, reality, charm; we get something at
first-hand that warms and stimulates.
In literature proper our interest, I think, is always in the writer
himself,--his quality, his personality, his point of view. We may fancy
that we care only for the subject matter; but the born writer makes any
subject interesting to us by his treatment of it or by the personal
element he infuses into it. When our concern is primarily with the
subject matter, with the fact or the argument, or with the information
conveyed, then we are not dealing with literature in the strict sense.
It is not so much what the writer tells us that makes literature, as
the way he tells it; or rather, it is the degree in which he imparts
to it some rare personal quality or charm that is the gift of his own
spirit, something which cannot be detached from the work itself, and
which is as inherent as the sheen of a bird’s plumage, as the texture
of a flower’s petal. There is this analogy in nature. The hive bee does
not get honey from the flowers; honey is a product of the bee. What she
gets from the flowers is mainly sweet water or nectar; this she puts
through a process of her own, and to it adds a minute drop of her own
secretion, formic acid. It is her special personal contribution that
converts the nectar into honey.
In the work of the literary artist, common facts and experiences are
changed and heightened in the same way. Sainte-Beuve, speaking of
certain parts of Rousseau’s “Confessions,” says, “Such pages were, in
French literature, the discovery of a new world, a world of sunshine
and of freshness, which men had near them without having perceived it.”
They had not perceived it because they had not had Rousseau’s mind to
mirror it for them. The sunshine and the freshness were a gift of his
spirit. The new world was the old world in a new light. What charmed
them was a quality personal to Rousseau. Nature they had always had,
but not the Rousseau sensibility to nature. The same may be said of
more recent writers upon outdoor themes. Readers fancy that in the
works of Thoreau or of Jefferies some new charm or quality of nature is
disclosed, that something hidden in field or wood is brought to light.
They do not see that what they are in love with is the mind or spirit
of the writer himself. Thoreau does not interpret nature, but nature
interprets him. The new thing disclosed in bird and flower is simply a
new sensibility to these objects in the beholder. In morals and ethics
the same thing is true. Let an essayist like Dr. Johnson or Arthur
Helps state a principle or an idea and it has a certain value; let an
essayist like Ruskin or Emerson or Carlyle state the same principle
and it has an entirely different value, makes an entirely different
impression,--the qualities of mind and character of these writers are
so different. The reader’s relation with them is much more intimate and
personal.
It is quality of mind which makes the writings of Burke rank above
those of Gladstone, Ruskin’s criticism above that of Hamerton, Froude’s
histories above Freeman’s, Renan’s “Life of Jesus” above that of
Strauss; which makes the pages of Goethe, Coleridge, Lamb, literature
in a sense that the works of many able minds are not. These men impart
something personal and distinctive to the language they use. They make
the words their own. The literary quality is not something put on. It
is not of the hand, it is of the mind; it is not of the mind, but of
the soul; it is of whatever is most vital and characteristic in the
writer. It is confined to no particular manner and to no particular
matter. It may be the gift of writers of widely different manners--of
Carlyle as well as of Arnold; and in men of similar manners, one may
have it and the other may not. It is as subtle as the tone of the voice
or the glance of the eye. Quality is the one thing in life that cannot
be analyzed, and it is the one thing in art that cannot be imitated. A
man’s manner may be copied, but his style, his charm, his real value,
can only be parodied. In the conscious or unconscious imitations of the
major poets by the minor, we get only a suggestion of the manner of the
former; their essential quality cannot be reproduced.
English literature is full of imitations of the Greek poets, but
that which the Greek poets did not and could not borrow they cannot
lend; their quality stays with them. The charm of spoken discourse is
largely in the personal quality of the speaker--something intangible
to print. When we see the thing in print, we wonder how it could so
have charmed or moved us. To convey this charm, this aroma of the man,
to the written discourse is the triumph of style. A recent French
critic says of Madame de Staël that she had no style; she wrote just
as she thought, but without being able to impart to her writing the
living quality of her speech. It is not importance of subject matter
that makes a work great, but importance of the subjectivity of the
writer,--a great mind, a great soul, a great personality. A work that
bears the imprint of these, that is charged with the life and power of
these, which it gives forth again under pressure, is alone entitled to
high rank.
All pure literature is the revelation of a man. In a work of true
literary art the subject matter has been so interpenetrated and
vitalized by the spirit or personality of the writer, has become so
thoroughly identified with it, that the two are one and inseparable,
and the style _is_ the man. Works in which this blending and
identification, through emotion or imagination, of the author with his
subject has not taken place, or has taken place imperfectly, do not
belong to pure literature. They may serve a useful purpose; but all
_useful_ purposes, in the strict sense, are foreign to those of art,
which means foreign to the spirit that would live in the whole, that
would live in the years and not in the days, in time and not in the
hour. The true literary artist gives you of the substance of his mind;
not merely his thought or his philosophy, but something more intimate
and personal than that. It is not a tangible object passed from his
hand to yours; it is much more like a transfusion of blood from his
veins to yours. Montaigne gives us Montaigne,--the most delightfully
garrulous man in literature. “These are fancies of my own,” he says,
“by which I do not pretend to discover things, but to lay open myself.”
“Cut these sentences,” says Emerson, “and they bleed.” Matthew Arnold
denied that Emerson was a great writer; but we cannot account for the
charm and influence of his works, it seems to me, on any other theory
than that he has at least this mark of the great writer: he gives his
reader of his own substance, he saturates his page with the high and
rare quality of his own spirit. Everything he published has a distinct
literary value, as distinguished from its moral or religious value. The
same may be said of Arnold himself: else we should not care much for
him. It is a particular and interesting type of man that speaks and
breathes in every sentence; his style is vital in his matter, and is no
more separable from it than the style of silver or of gold is separable
from those metals.
In such a writer as Lecky on the other hand, or as Mill or Spencer,
one does not get this same subtle individual flavor; the work is more
external, more the product of certain special faculties, as the reason,
the memory, the understanding; and the personality of the author is
not so intimately involved. But in the writer with the creative touch,
whether he be poet, novelist, historian, critic, essayist, the chief
factor in the product is always his own personality.
Style, then, in the sense in which I am here using the term, implies
that vital, intimate, personal relation of the man to his language by
which he makes the words his own, fills them with his own quality, and
gives the reader that lively sense of being in direct communication
with a living, breathing, mental and spiritual force. The writer who
appears to wield his language as an instrument or a tool, something
exterior to himself, who makes you conscious of his vocabulary, or
whose words are the garments and not the tissue of his thought,
has not style in this sense. “Style,” says Schopenhauer, “is the
physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face.”
This definition is as good as any, and better than most, because it
implies that identification of words with thoughts, of the man with
his subject, which is the secret of a living style. Hence the man who
imitates another wears a mask, as does the man who writes in a language
to which he was not born.