STYLE.
FEW things more mark the criticism of our day than the praises lavished upon Style ; few things more mark the attitude of the great reading class than the stolidity with which such eulogies are heard. Nor need we go far to find an explanation. In our time, with its host of distractions from serious study, and its crowd of prints that must be skimmed by all who would not be thought contemptibly ignorant, style is swiftly gathering a new utilitarian value. Style means such an arrangement of words as shall make the author's meaning rise up in the logical order of the ideas, and
thus save the reader all needless toil ; such a choice of phrase, and balance of clause, and structural grace of sentence as shall satisfy the sense of beauty ; such a propriety, economy, and harmony of expression as shall tell the reader exactly what the writer means, tell it with a business-like brevity and an artistic beauty. All these qualities characterize style of the highest order. Style is, there- fore, an artistic expedient to make reading easy, and to perpetuate the life of written thought. Of all the badly-written books be- queathed by past generations, none have lived but those of tran- scendent intellectual merit, or those to which a supreme historical value is lent by their pictures of vanished days ; whereas writing of the secondary intellectual rank may be kept green by the vitality of its artistic workmanship. Indeed, works of second-rate value in point of thought or archaeological interest are inevitably doomed to a speedy death unless they bear such a passport to futurity as a first-rate style. France saw that fact long before England. Partly because the French mind has a keener perception than the English of the Greek-like simplicity and directness which belong to the highest artistic beauty ; partly because the French language falls more easily than the English into symmetrical moulds ; and partly because the French Academy has acted as a literary police for the suppression of verbal licence, France can still teach England the academic graces of style with as much authority as Greece taught rhetoric to Rome. While our greatest writers were still pouring forth their thoughts with inartistic skill, or were rising to perfect beauty of statement only when possessed with that fierce heat of passion which gives to rhetoric an arrowy directness and a rhythmical flow, France had already achieved a classic propriety of style. As an artistic product, Pascal's rhetoric is better than than that of any English contemporary ; so is that of Bossuet, Voltaire, and Courier. Even in the present enfeebled stage of French literature, no Englishman writes with Rezian's incom- parable academic beauty, nor, in the lower ranks of journalism, can the beat foreign rhetoric match the elegance of Prevost- Paradol's somewhat feeble disquisitions. But although the art of rhetoric has still to be tanght in England with such rigour as it is taught in France, it is long since our men of letters saw the supreme value of artistic expression, and those of the present day have reached an unexampled stage of academic ele- gance. In rhetorical excellence, Landor, De Quincey, John Henry Newman, Macaulay, Fronde, Goldwin Smith, and the crowd of nameless men who address the public from hour to hour, stand each in his way far above the past writers of corresponding power. We are now casting the English language into finer moulds. We are amassing new and more subtle canons of style. The landmarks of good rhetoric are every day becoming more abundant and more certain, so that the old pitfalls are no longer perilous even to feeble feet.
The value of style as an instrument for winning the attention of the public, for saving the reader all needless labour, and for keeping a hold on the grateful memory, explains why writers who are deemed masters of language wring constant and feverish eulogy from their fellow-workmen. But, as we have already said, those eulogies find a feeble echo in the public mind ; and men whose writing is proclaimed to be a marvel of literary art are often read only by the cultivated class. It is easy to see why the professional man of letters should be thus eager with his praises. Since he is keenly alive to the difficulty of writing perfect English, he instinctively looks for technical triumphs of expression, and he attributes a value to style for its own sake. Unconsciously, he is prone to set most store by that writing which gives himself the beat lessons in rhetoric, and he finds what he seeks in the style which obtrudes itself by its very brilliancy, or by the completeness of its triumph over the difficulties that beset his own pen. In such a style the art is always more or less vividly revealed. It is so vividly revealed that we can mark the process of the worker, and study his devices, with almost as much ease, and as much profit, as an engineer can draw the details of a new and curious machine. On the other hand, such art must be second-rate. In literature, in painting, or in music, the highest art hides the band of the workman under a thick veil. A literary artist of the second rank, like Macaulay, makes constant use of devices which are obviously mechanical and which can be learnt ; a writer of the first order, even if he do not stand in the fore- most place of that hierarchy, such as Heine, is constantly invent- ing new forms, which seem to evaporate in the act of analysis. The one might be compared to a skilled artizan who, after cutting a limited number of dies, employs them again and again, so that the student can readily copy the figures, and use them in much the same fashion as the artist himself; the other seems like an artist with so rich an invention that he never takes two impressions from the same die, but breaks up each design the instant that he has struck it into wax, and then cuts another into form. While art of the second rank is thin and easily dissected, art of the first rank is the product of subtle organization, like human life itself. The thinking of Shakespeare's characters, for example, is characterized by all that subtle, rich, confused play of motive, device, and reason which we detect in the workings of our own mind ; it is many- tinted ; it is full of labyrinthine folds ; it unveils by glimpses the unexplored, unfathomable abysses of the soul. The rhetoric which can express the profundity and the comprehensiveness of a passion like Lear's, can be confined within the limits of no academic rules, and creates a rhetoric of its own.
The moralizing of a second-rate mind like Pope, on the other hand, is so thin, so definite, so much a student's translation of the thoughts and passions which prompt human acts, that it naturally yields itself to t':.e guiding hand of the academy. And, because Pope is full of definite design, the student of rhetoric finds him a more skilful teacher than Shakespeare himself. The " style " of Shakespeare would, as " style," never be lauded. The style of Pope is the very type of that rhetoric which men of letters celebrate with the hallelujahs of the study. At the same time, writing of the second order has its degrees. Although Macaulay and De Quincey both belong to that rank, there is a wide gulf between their rhetoric. As an essayist and a historian, Macaulay has won unexampled popularity, because lie expresses the most intelligible ideas in the most vivid language, and because, both in disquisition and in narrative, his power of lucid, swift, brilliant statement has never been surpassed. On the other hand, his rhetorical devices are so few, so transparent, so easily mastered, and so possessed with the very demon of mannerism, that they soon cease to repay, and soon weary the student. Hence, now that the " History " and the " Essays " have lost the freshness of their virgin charm, they wring but cold and stinted eulogies from the rhetorical laboratory. De Quincey, on the contrary, is the theme of ceaseless and exstatic eulogies. Not a writer of recent times is oftener read by men of letters who seek to rise above the laxities of ephemeral workmanship ; not a writer in the language is more worthy of devout scrutiny by him who would master the resources of that rhetoric which can be acquired by study. Gifted with brilliant powers as a thinker, and more variously learned than any literary artist of his time, De Quincey was disproportionately endowed with the faculty of expression. Even in the narrow world of the nursery, with no other audience than the wayward brother who smote him with awe, and the young sister to whom his passionate rhetoric has given an immortality in literature, the dreamy boy found language an instrument of mira- culous power. Afterwards he studied all its rhetorical resources with a keener eye for the devices by which its riches might be un- veiled, than any other student of whom our literary annals present a token. Hence, if his frequent seasons of literary debility per- mitted him to be criminally feeble and trivial, he has left passages which, in structural perfection of sentence, in com- mand over all the resources of the English tongue, in a marriage of rhythmical and impassioned music with a logi- cal accuracy of thought and a Greek-like propriety of phrase, can scarcely be excelled in the literature of England. At his best, De Quincey has no superior as a stylist. His rhetoric is separated from that of Macaulay by all the distance which cuts off the mechanically regular patterns of the old silk fabrics, from those which now glow with the form of flower and living thing. And it is the comparatively defective character of De Quincey's mind that has contributed to make him pre-enainent as a rhetorician, and to give him a first place among the teachers of expression. Since the richness and fertility of his thought do not equal the richness and fertility of his language, the style seems to stand out from the page like a bas-relief, and to claim study for its own sake. It presents the student with palpable models. It challenges dissection, and seems to submit itself to the dissecting-knife. It reveals the artist in the act of working, ostentatiously proud of his skill, and inviting a crowd of gazing eyes. Unlike Opie, De Quincey would not say that he mixed his colours with "brains," but could tell the exact components of each tint. Unlike those painters who can give no reason why
they work in a particular fashion, and who lay tint on tint at the mandate of a mysterious instinct, De Quincey could offer a philo-
sophical reason for the choice of each word, for the architectural structure of each clause. He was guided by the dictate of the conscious analytical faculty. Even in his highest flights he was ever a rhetorician. Even in tracing with magnificent power the linea- ments worn by the "Three Ladies of Sorrow," he did not rise above the tyranny of rhetorical rules ; he did not emancipate him- self from the rigidity of the schools ; nor could he free the reader's mind from the idea that the rhetoric was indebted for a share of its passion and its beauty to the touch of some mechanism which, although wonderful and mysterious in its power, was mechanism still. Hence De Quincey for ever dwells in the second hierarchy of letters. But, we repeat, he is for that very reason a more potent master of what is technically called Style than writers of more etherial genius, and a better teacher of rhetoric even than the masters of literature themselves. That is the reason why his name is oftener cited in the literary schools than the names of loftier intellects.
On the other hand, by that great reading public which is but imperfectly acquainted with the technical merits of literary art, and has but a feeble interest in artistic methods, De Quincey is read with less enthusiasm. In this respect he may be classed with Landor. Landor's prose, it is true, lacked some of the qualities which lend to that of De Quincey its potency of charm. It has neither his variety and richness of hue, nor his power of falling into a con- versational ease, or of rising into a Miltonic rapture. But it has terseness, point, and polish beyond any other prose in the language. If not exempt from the artificial air which clings to all academic styles, it is at least an academic style of the highest rank. Had England such an Academy as that of France, it is the style of the- "imaginary Conversations" that would be singled out for the high- est eulogy. It is, indeed, the only English which we can place into competition with the French of Paul Louis Courier. With all their faults, Landor and De Quincey are the most per- fect prose writers of modern England. Yet even De Quincey is not popular in the same sense as Macaulay, while Lander belongs to the class of writers who, though never mentioned with- out admiration, are read by the student-class alone. And why such comparative neglect? Why have not the authors of the " Suspiria de Profundis " and the "Imaginary Conversations" the bookstall fame of Scott and Dickens ? The answer is. that they are too artificial. Their thinking is that of the- closet, and is addressed to minds enriched by large stores of knowledge, and by familiarity with a wide circle of recondite ideas. For the most part, they deal, not with those primary thoughts and feelings which are common to the lettered and the unlettered, but with the artificial ideas and impulses which are born of tutored reflection and class experience. They reflect what men have done and said, rather than human nature itself. In fulfilling that office they no doubt represent a, great and growing class ; for, as M. Prevost-Paradol has been reminding us at Edinburgh, the cultivated men of each country are not cut off from each other by the boundaries of language, commercial interest, or political ambition, but are the citizens of one noble nation which is bound together by its common loyalty to Truth. Nevertheless, that great and noble nation is less. great and less noble than the world. Writers who either wholly or- chiefly speak to that nation belong to the second rank. They are artificial, and, as Mr. Matthew Arnold would say, they utter "the note of provinciality." De Quincey sounds that note, so does. Lander, so does Sainte-Beuve, and so, pre-eminently, does the critic and poet who in England officiates as the high priest at the altar of culture, —Mr. Matthew Arnold himself. It is the pre- rogative of the highest genius, on the contrary, to deal with. human nature at first hand, by touching those emotions which are common to all men, and by making potent use of the thoughts- which well up in the minds of all. At times, of course, the highest genius may also speak exclusively to the lettered class. Shaks- speare sometimes thinks such thoughts and speaks such language as- only those brethren who have the gift of prophecy can interpret.
Danteand Milton are often the poets of the learned alone. But were they even greater than they are, they would be more fre-
quently the poets of humanity ; and Shakespeare stands at the-
head of all poets because, while no range of reflective thought stretches beyond his orbit, the magnificence of his genius is best seen when he handles those primary feelings of love and hate, of mirth and fear, those every-day objects of ambition and hope, which are the heritage of the race. Scott is the most popular of all novelists, and promises to keep the same lead among.
the masters of prose fiction that Shakespeare holds among: the masters of verse, because, among all novelists of adequate- power, he is the least indebted for effect to the fleeting accident& of time and place, and because he speaks most directly to the natural reason and the natural heart. On similar grounds, Byron, is the poet best loved by the young and the uneducated ; and ir cultivated men do not read him with the same enthusiasm, the reason is, that the range of his magnificent powers is limited, that he is a stranger to the whole world of thought which is born of reflection, and that, being too deficient in dramatic faculty to portray human nature with completeness, he falls into those ex- aggerations which are the bane of art. In an academical sense, the style neither of Scott nor of Byron is of the highest order. It is full of imperfections that jar on the trained ear like so many false notes of music. But men of such consummate power are independent of rhetorical aids to the achievement of immor- tality, and, until the English public shall acquire a culture of which it does not yet dream, it will detect no lack of rhetorical perfection in such masters over the springs of interest and emotion. It is to the second and third-rate men that perfection of style is of first-rate importance. To them it every day becomes of higher moment. They will not be read by the great mass unless, by potency of style, they smooth the reader's path, and lure him on. If they live at all, it will be in the minds of cultivated men ; and cultivated men cannot afford to study second or third-rate intellect often enough to keep its fame green, unless its thoughts be enclasped in language of such perfect form as to be a source of pleasure in itself. We repeat, however, that style itself will never give real popularity to a writer who does not chiefly deal with human nature at first hand, as an original artist, and not as a commentator on artificial thought. And, in the long run, real popularity is the test of real merit. The repu- tation of a clique is always treacherous and fleeting. That of the bookstall alone endures until the end.
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