Style
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Walter Raleigh >> Style
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Here, among words, our lot is cast, to make or mar. It is in this
obscure thicket, overgrown with weeds, set with thorns, and haunted
by shadows, this World of Words, as the Elizabethans finely called
it, that we wander, eternal pioneers, during the course of our
mortal lives. To be overtaken by a master, one who comes along
with the gaiety of assured skill and courage, with the gravity of
unflinching purpose, to make the crooked ways straight and the
rough places plain, is to gain fresh confidence from despair. He
twines wreaths of the entangling ivy, and builds ramparts of the
thorns. He blazes his mark upon the secular oaks, as a guidance to
later travellers, and coaxes flame from heaps of mouldering
rubbish. There is no sense of cheer like this. Sincerity,
clarity, candour, power, seem real once more, real and easy. In
the light of great literary achievement, straight and wonderful,
like the roads of the ancient Romans, barbarism torments the mind
like a riddle. Yet there are the dusky barbarians!--fleeing from
the harmonious tread of the ordered legions, running to hide
themselves in the morass of vulgar sentiment, to ambush their
nakedness in the sand-pits of low thought.
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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