A. BOOK OF THE MOMENT.

A STATESMAN ON STYLE.

Studies and Sketches. By the Rt. Hon. H. H. Asquith. (Hutchinson and Co. 10s. 6d. net.)

BY far the most notable portion of Mr. Asquith's Book of Essays—ranging from the Victorians to an article on Tacitus, which appeared in the Spectator some fifty years ago—is that which deals with the eternal but always deeply moving problem of style. The " peg" is a study of Sir Henry Wotton. Every man who has any sense of literature in him is bound to think about style, and every man to whom it is given to express himself in the field of literary criticism must sooner or later deal with the problem. He cannot resist the tempta- tion any more than the moth can forbear the lamp. It was therefore inevitable that Mr. Asquith, who has so notable a taste for scholarship in the widest sense, and so great a power of exposition, and who shows, within certain strictly prescribed limits, so sound an instinct for style in his own writings, should make his offering on the altar of Verbal Inspiration.

In his Essay on Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Asquith deals directly and with evident gusto with style in poetry—a simpler, more definite, and therefore easier matter than the haunting and elusive problem of style in prose. Though I do not altogether agree with Mr. Asquith's attitude towards style in poetry, or with his implied definition—he is too cautious and too experi- enced a dialectician to plunge into the chilling, if crystal, stream of a direct prescription of limitations—or again, with his many and notable examples of merit, I must pay my homage to the clarity, intellectual sincerity and seriousness with which he states his case. He really does mean business when he is dealing with literature. He is out to understand and to help others to understand, and not, like too many statesmen with a taste for letters, merely to show off. There is no parade of learning or of haut-goa I in his criticism.

All the same, his failure to tell us what precisely he means by style is a serious blot on his Essay. In truth, he evades the issue, both in precept and example, as the following passage shows :—

" Style in poetry, even more, perhaps, than in prose, is an art, even an artifice ; it is sought out, thought out, wrought out. It does not fetter inspiration, though you may have inspiration without it. It is both a vesture and a vehicle ; incommunicable, almost indefinable, never mistakable. It is beat understood not by description or by analysis, but by illustration. Among all the Classical poets, whether Greek or Latin, Virgil is the best example.. English . English poetry is specially rich in groat masters of style. Shakespeare was so much else that we hardly number him among them ; yet when he pleased he could excel them all. Take one or two of the simplest illustrations. Fortinbras at the end of the last scene in Hantlet:—

` 0 proud death, What feast is toward in thine eternal cell ' ; or Leontes in A Winter's Tale ' Stars, stars,

And all eyes else dead coals' ; ihr Cleopatra :

Give me my robe, put on my crown ; I have Immortal longings in me ' ;

or Othello, in a Miltonian outburst :

Like to the Pontic Sea Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontic and the Hellespont' ; or in the most perfect of all lyrics in Cymbeline : ' Fear no more the heat of the sun.'

These, and they could easily be multiplied by the hundred, cannot for pure style be surpassed.

But Shakespeare we must always leave in a class by himself. With that reservation, by far our greatest master in poetic style, in the seine in which 'I am now using the word, is Milton. You cannot open a page of Paradise Lost, or of Lycidas, or Comas ; you can hardly find one of the Sonnets which does not provide you with a wealth of examples. 1 will be content with one citation from what has been described by an acute and accomplished critic as ' probably the most unadorned poem in ‘any language,' Paradise Regained. It is singled out by Mr, Bailey in his admirable mono- graph on Milton ; the famous temptation ' of the banquet, where the profuse luxuriance of a Roman feast is contrasted with

that crude apple that diverted Eve.

Delightfully written as is this " exhibit," and fascinating as are most of the lines quoted, I venture to say that it is possible to get very much nearer a definition, or at any rate, an explanation of what is- the makesus bestoir the -title of style. In the first 'place,— style in -the sense in which Mr. Asquith uses it, and in which I also use it here, is the child of inspiration. It is not the product of " an art, or even an artifice." It is no result of the application of the Curiosa Felicitas or " happy knack." Style is not an acquisition. It has often belonged to the uneducated, to the man who has had no culture from outside. We thrill again and again to the overmastering sense of style in the poetry of Burns and Blake, and in the prose of Abraham Lincoln. I choose almost at random to illustrate my meaning. Who dare deny that there is style in the fullest sense in such lines

SS

• " Her cheeks like lilies • Drenched in wine:"

Or in

" What immortal hand or eye

Framed thy matchless symmetry "

Or again in Lincoln's majestic prose :— " Until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred years of unrequited toil, shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword."

The men who wrote such words as these had not plodded with grammarians and rhetoricians to acquire the -artifice of style.

It Came to the first as he bent, in wind and rain, to the Ayrshire

furrow ; to the second in a London garret ; to the last in the turbid tempests of politics and war. Style in the written word is what we call magnetism in a man, something which attracts and endears, we know not how. It has the magic or at any rate the mystic quality. As we read a passage, a phrase endowed with style, we tremble as did Felix when he heard of " righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come." He who has the true sense of style—its true appre- ciation needs a power in the recipient as well as in the initiatov—when he comes under the spell invoked by noble words, knows what the Roman poet meant when he uttered

that most piercing of heart-cries, Ut vidi ut perii. To put what I mean in another way. Style is to, poetry

and prose what vitamins are to the food we eat. If the vitamins are there we are nourished. If not, however many courses, and however large the portions, we but share a Barmecide feast. The chemists and biologists, though they know when the vitamins are there, and have not been scraped or washedawily—polishing rice destroys the vitamins, just as over-polishing verse kills the poetic inspiration—and can differentiate between two or three kinds, cannot tell us of what vitamins consist. They do not yield to analysis. So style does not fail to be a reality because we cannot catalogue its component parts, but instead have to describe and treat it as mathematicians treat an incommensurable. We can deal with style as they deal with V —2.

Once more style in the sense in which I am using the word, that is, as the highest quality in the presentment of verse or prose, is an inspiration attached to words and phrases. And here I may note that if we apply this formula it will not in essentials prevent acceptance of Mr. Middleton Murry's admirable study of style—probably the best in our language— nor, again, will it, in the abstract, contradict or. deny Mr. Asquith's skilfully drawn pleas at the Bar of Parnassus.

When, however, Mr. Asquith's specific examples of style in poetry are examined I find a good deal of divergence of view. For instance, he makes Sir Henry Wotton a capital example of style. Now, much as I admire and delight in the poem on the Queen of Bohemia and " The Happy Life," I find them a little languid in their appeal. I take my pleasures therein rather too easily and comfortably. I do not see and perish. I am not overborne by a sudden mastery. ' I am not carried off my feet. I do not say with South, " Men and masters, what shall we do ? " In a word, my pulse is not raised, or my cheek flushed. I do not feel that a portion of the divine ecstasy has passed from out the poet's lines, and fired ;my brain as once it fired his.

I am, of course, finely touched by Milton's exquisite

" That crude apple that diverted Eve," and by the glorious apostrophe that follows :-

" Fairer than feigned of old or fabled since Of faery damsels, met in forests wide,"

but I feel that they are so splendidly caparisoned in a glorious rhetoric that they confuse the issue. When one is trying

to get the plain man to distinguish between rhetoric and ornament and style in the true sense I would rather take simpler examples—lines in which the inherent mystery and magio of true style is not concealed by the trappings.

Therefore I shall choose to illustrate what I mean by a colder, austerer example—though one also from Milton. When it is a question of style it is only natural to go back to

Paradise Regained, as Mr. Asquith found. The lines I take themselves deal with this very problem of style. They are precept and example combined. In the story of the tempta- tion Satan speaks to our Lord of the glories of Grecian and Roman verse, and of what their poets and orators accomplished. The Saviour answers him in verse worthy of a scene so deeply fraught with pathos, so magnificent, so august, so moving.

He has no need for such aids, He tells the Tempter ; or if He has He can find them in those lively oracles of God, the writings of the Hebrew prophets :-

" As men divinely taught, and better teaching

The solid rules of Civil Government IA their majestic unaffected style

Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome.

In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt What makes a nation happy, keeps it so, What ruins kingdoms and lays cities flat."

Here, if anywhere, we find style divested of all adventitious aids, stripped naked if you will, and yet only gaining by the process of disrobement. There is no ornament, no straining for effect, no painting of the lily, no affectation, even of simplicity. And yet the verses fall on the ear as did that majestic melody which flowed from Heaven's Empyrean, when the stars sang together.

The Editorial sands are running out. The sub-editor is looking anxious. The printer is sceptical of my glib promises of amendment in space in a strike week. But before I leave this most fascinating of all the themes of the literary craft, I must note a curious omission in Mr. Asquith's Essay. He gives no example of style from that master in our mystery—Pope. Pope had many faults as a poet, but if ever man was redeemed by the possession of the pearl of price, the all-compelling talisman of style, it was Pope. His devotion to the couplet, and to a use of the antithesis almost mechanical, his worship of a cheap and conventional metaphysic, his narrow point of view, his petty logic, and his sophistical premises, cannot quench the sacred fire. Style cannot be hid. It is always flashing through. Even in the least inspired and most manu- factured pieces of party satire it still is alight. Take such lines as these, chosen on the spur of the moment and quoted from memory :— " To happy convents bosomed deep in vines."

Or :—

" But ah how vast a memory hath Love !"

Or :— " Oh! Master of the Poet, and the Song."

Take last that exquisite couplet 'which Pope thought his best. Johnson, strangely enough, could not tell why. It was, of course, because the great stylist realized that his achievement in his special form of style had flowered in perfection :- " Lo 1 where Mceotis sleeps and hardly flows

The freezing Times through a waste of snows."

But though Johnson failed to acknowledge this great example he was himself, on occasion, no mean master of style in verse and prose. The lines on the death of Levett have style in the highest sense. So has the last couplet of the Elegy on Phillips the Musician :—

" Till Angels wake thee with a note like thine."

Another master of style when he chose was Crabbe. If proof is wanted here it is :—

" And like fair virgins dancing in a round

Each binds the other and herself is bound."

Dryden is, of course, a Titan in the matter of style, but so, curiously enough, was Congreve, though usually he managed to obscure the divine illumination. Even in " The Mourning Bride " there is a blank verse line which has the true afflatus :-

" We two have backward trod the paths of Fate."

Let those who deride the reverent face " of this tall Pile " hide their heads before this noble instance of true style.

Mr. Asquith rightly, perhaps necessarily, as he did not want to be snowed under, puts Shakespeare aside when he discusses style. Or rather, he vows he will do so, and then, compelled by the temptation, proceeds to quote from Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale. So will I, though it is a wanton luxury.

Instead of a peroration to my offering to the Goddess of Words, here are three examples of style from Shakespeare, They are not by any means the greatest discoverable, but they pierce like the sharpest javelin :— " 0 infinite virtue, comest thou smiling from The world's great snare uncaught ? "

How full of honeyed sweetness is

" Now stand you on the top of Happy Hours." Finally, who can run free from such lines as these :—

" Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic Soul

Of the wide World dreaming on things to come."

He who has not his pulse raised twenty beats by these twIl lines had better at once forswear the Pilgrimage to Parnassus;

That golden road is not for him. J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.