It is a venerable custom to knit up the speculative consideration of any subject with the counsels of practical wisdom.The words of this essay have been vain indeed if the idea that style may be imparted by tuition has eluded them, and survived.There is a useful art of Grammar, which takes for its province the right and the wrong in speech.Style deals only with what is permissible to all, and even revokes, on occasion, the rigid laws of Grammar or countenances offences against them.Yet no one is a better judge of equity for ignorance of the law, and grammatical practice offers a fair field wherein to acquire ease, accuracy and versatility.
The formation of sentences, the sequence of verbs, the marshalling of the ranks of auxiliaries are all, in a sense, to be learned.
There is a kind of inarticulate disorder to which writers are liable, quite distinct from a bad style, and caused chiefly by lack of exercise.An unpractised writer will sometimes send a beautiful and powerful phrase jostling along in the midst of a clumsy sentence - like a crowned king escorted by a mob.
But Style cannot be taught.Imitation of the masters, or of some one chosen master, and the constant purging of language by a severe criticism, have their uses, not to be belittled; they have also their dangers.The greater part of what is called the teaching of style must always be negative, bad habits may be broken down, old malpractices prohibited.The pillory and the stocks are hardly educational agents, but they make it easier for honest men to enjoy their own.If style could really be taught, it is a question whether its teachers should not be regarded as mischief-makers and enemies of mankind.The Rosicrucians professed to have found the philosopher's stone, and the shadowy sages of modern Thibet are said, by those who speak for them, to have compassed the instantaneous transference of bodies from place to place.In either case, the holders of these secrets have laudably refused to publish them, lest avarice and malice should run amuck in human society.A similar fear might well visit the conscience of one who should dream that he had divulged to the world at large what can be done with language.Of this there is no danger; rhetoric, it is true, does put fluency, emphasis, and other warlike equipments at the disposal of evil forces, but style, like the Christian religion, is one of those open secrets which are most easily and most effectively kept by the initiate from age to age.Divination is the only means of access to these mysteries.The formal attempt to impart a good style is like the melancholy task of the teacher of gesture and oratory; some palpable faults are soon corrected;and, for the rest, a few conspicuous mannerisms, a few theatrical postures, not truly expressive, and a high tragical strut, are all that can be imparted.The truth of the old Roman teachers of rhetoric is here witnessed afresh, to be a good orator it is first of all necessary to be a good man.Good style is the greatest of revealers, - it lays bare the soul.The soul of the cheat shuns nothing so much."Always be ready to speak your minds" said Blake, "and a base man will avoid you." But to insist that he also shall speak his mind is to go a step further, it is to take from the impostor his wooden leg, to prohibit his lucrative whine, his mumping and his canting, to force the poor silly soul to stand erect among its fellows and declare itself.His occupation is gone, and he does not love the censor who deprives him of the weapons of his mendicity.
All style is gesture, the gesture of the mind and of the soul.
Mind we have in common, inasmuch as the laws of right reason are not different for different minds.Therefore clearness and arrangement can be taught, sheer incompetence in the art of expression can be partly remedied.But who shall impose laws upon the soul? It is thus of common note that one may dislike or even hate a particular style while admiring its facility, its strength, its skilful adaptation to the matter set forth.Milton, a chaster and more unerring master of the art than Shakespeare, reveals no such lovable personality.While persons count for much, style, the index to persons, can never count for little."Speak," it has been said, "that I may know you" - voice-gesture is more than feature.
Write, and after you have attained to some control over the instrument, you write yourself down whether you will or no.There is no vice, however unconscious, no virtue, however shy, no touch of meanness or of generosity in your character, that will not pass on to the paper.You anticipate the Day of Judgment and furnish the recording angel with material.The Art of Criticism in literature, so often decried and given a subordinate place among the arts, is none other than the art of reading and interpreting these written evidences.Criticism has been popularly opposed to creation, perhaps because the kind of creation that it attempts is rarely achieved, and so the world forgets that the main business of Criticism, after all, is not to legislate, nor to classify, but to raise the dead.Graves, at its command, have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth.It is by the creative power of this art that the living man is reconstructed from the litter of blurred and fragmentary paper documents that he has left to posterity.
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