What do we mean by style? Something, at all events, very different from
manner, in spite of Mr. Hamerton's insistence upon the contrary. Is the
quality in virtue of which--as Mr. Dobson paraphrases Gautier--
"The bust outlives the throne,
The coin Tiberius"
the specific personality of the artist who carved the bust or chiselled
the coin that have thus outlived all personality connected with them?
Not that personality is not of the essence of enduring art. It is, on
the contrary, the condition of any vital art whatever. But what gives
the object, once personally conceived and expressed, its currency, its
universality, its eternal interest--speaking to strangers with familiar
vividness, and to posterity as to contemporaries--is something aside
from its personal feeling. And it is this something and not specific
personality that style is. Style is the invisible wind through whose
influence "the lion on the flag" of the Persian poet "moves and
marches." The lion of personality may be painted never so deftly, with
never so much expression, individual feeling, picturesqueness, energy,
charm; it will not move and march save through the rhythmic, waving
influence of style.
Nor is style necessarily the grand style, as Arnold seems to imply, in
calling it "a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain
condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say in such a
manner as to add dignity and distinction to it." Perhaps the most
explicit examples of pure style owe their production to spiritual
coolness; and, in any event, the word "peculiar" in a definition begs
the question. Buffon is at once juster and more definite in saying:
"Style is nothing other than the order and movement which we put into
our thoughts." It is singular that this simple and lucid utterance of
Buffon should have been so little noticed by those who have written in
English on style. In general English writers have apparently
misconceived, in very curious fashion, Buffon's other remark, "le style
c'est l'homme;" by which aphorism Buffon merely meant that a man's
individual manner depends on his temperament, his character, and which
he, of course, was very far from suspecting would ever be taken for a
definition.
Following Buffon's idea of "order and movement," we may say, perhaps,
that style results from the preservation in every part of some sense of
the form of the whole. It implies a sense of relations as well as of
statement. It is not mere expression of a thought in a manner peculiar
to the artist (in words, color, marble, what not), but it is such
expression penetrated with both reminiscence and anticipation. It is,
indeed, on the contrary, very nearly the reverse of what we mean by
expression, which is mainly a matter of personal energy. Style means
correctness, precision, that feeling for the _ensemble_ on which an
inharmonious detail jars. Expression results from a sense of the value
of the detail. If Walt Whitman, for example, were what his admirers'
defective sense of style fancies him, he would be expressive. If French
academic art had as little expression as its censors assert, it would
still illustrate style--the quality which modifies the native and
apposite form of the concrete individual thing with reference to what
has preceded and what is to follow it; the quality, in a word, whose
effort is to harmonize the object with its environment. When this
environment is heightened, and universal instead of logical and
particular, we have the "grand style;" but we have the grand style
generally in poetry, and to be sure of style at all prose--such prose as
Goujon's, which in no wise emulates Michael Angelo's poetry--may
justifiably neglect in some degree the specific personality that tends
to make it poetic and individual.