a long-sustained passage of prose. Like Swinburne, De Quincey runs too near the artificial. In general, the finer harmony of prose is typically freer, less obvious, more implicit; in particular, the recurrences should be felt rather than remarked. In sound, as in sense, that effect of which we are separately conscious is less than perfect. The ideal is that no feature of style should call attention to itself, that each should be felt only as chiming with the effect of the whole. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood; and at first it was fair as the morning and full with the dew of heaven, as a lamb's fleece. But when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age. It bowed the head and broke its stalk; and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces. JEREMY TAYLOR: The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, Chapter i., § 2. f. Sincerity 237. Elegance, strength, harmony, are thus seen to demand the cultivation of every student of style. But as the primary and ultimate meaning of style is the artistic expression of personality, so the proportion of these qualities in any style is quite beyond rules, is the choice of the particular artist. Rather we should not speak of proportion at all, as if style might be produced by judicious mixture, but only of the different points of view which we may assume for revision. And never can any one safely permit himself to forget that his object is not to make style, as if style were something separate from himself and his message, but only to attain style by better and better truth to what moves him to speak. Style conceived as something separable, as ornament applicable after the thing is done, is a delusion as immoral as it is inartistic. All ornament, in any art, that does not spring as if organically from the conception of the whole is an offence to good taste; but in literature it is worse than anywhere else. For words are so far the necessary expression of all men, they involve so much of life, that what in other arts is bad taste, in literature is bad morals. To study style as a mechanism of extraneous ornament would be both futile and insincere. Few men, we must presume, can ever be so misguided; but there is some danger for almost every one of lapsing in that direction. Every time a writer determines a phrase purely by its elegance, strength, or harmony, apart from its faithfulness to his message, he is guilty of malfeasance; and a habit of phrase-seeking, in this sense of those words, is usually punished, not only by loss of self-respect, but also by loss of artistic power. Naïveté is a different matter, the gift of directness which we call unconscious art. Some men never lose the child's unconsciousness of how his expression appears to a conventional world, never lose it or can recall it at will. So they "pretend" singly and fully- and that is sincere art. But sincere art is not confined to this happy birthright. Indeed, for most men, even for most artists, it is an attainment of conscious striving. The popular idea that for sincerity of expression the only need is something to say and a plentiful lack of training in how to say it, is a fallacy refuted over and over again by authors who, with the abundance of matter both new and personal, for lack of A training give it forth in feeble conventionalities. "rhetorical" style, indeed, in the sense of a style whose ornament is extraneous, whose heightening of language is for its own sake, arises not so often from skill in technic as from clumsiness. It is typically the fault of the untrained. Native or acquired, then, or native and acquired, sincerity is the final virtue of style. An artist's only safety and his constant duty is to abhor cant, always to be sincere. |