STYLE.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1366, 17 February 1912, Page 11

STYLE.

In one of his well-known weekly articles, the Right Hon. G. W. E. Russell gossiped pleasantly on style: "Le Steel Sny Lum— the Style is the Man, -that's why it's so important for us to attend to Style," said Mr. Edward' Ponderevo, when considering the value of a Preach advertisement for "TonoBungay," and added, with great truth, "As for accent, no Englishman has an accent. No Englishman pronounces I'rench properly. It's all a bluff." Tho Stylo is the Man.- I linger lovingly over the' words, because they have just received a pointed and flattering application to my own ease. An unknown friend invites me to write on Style, "with illustrations from the works of Literary Men." Unfolding his theme, my friend enumerates several' styles—"the distinguished style, the strong, racy, graceful styles, the commonplace and ponderous 6tyics," and others. And then, after referring to an article of mine published some years ago in this column, he says, reflectively, "I am inclined to think that that article reached lho 'Distinguished' level." Yes —The Style is the Man; and a writer who oven once, in a long life of literary composition, has reached' "the Distinguished level," must himself be a Distinguished Man. It was all very well for Mr. I'ondercvo to pride himself on his skill in penning advertisements, hut, I, too, am an author, and "Lo Steel Say I.um." Thus encouraged, I proceed with the task assigned to me, but I fear that Uio limits of space will not allow me to indulge my friend with many "illustrations from the works of Literary Men." Ho. must kindly take my opinions for what they are.worth, and confirm or refute them by reference to hooks.' . Matthew Arnold once said to me—"People think I can teach them style. AVhat stuff it all is! Have something', to say, and say it as clearly as you can. Thai is the only secret of style." Have something to say—oxccllent counsel. A man who sits down to write, having nothing to say, soon finds himself playing with words for thoii- own sake. Ho is not using them to express his meaning, for he has no meaning to express; bi)t is choosing them because they aro rare, or melodious, or emphatic, and is arranging thorn in tho combinations and sequences in which they will sound prettiest or most forcibly attract attention. Henco come preciousness and artificiality, and n- thousand evils. "Have 6omothing to say" and, then, "say it as clearly as you ran." This canon at onco dismisses the "ponderous" stylo to which my correspondent justly objects. A man who wished to ray as clearly as ho could he was going to bed would not say, Ere yet I consign my limbs to repose." I.'or the perfection of tho ponderous stylo the reader is referred to. Miss Jenkyn's letters in "Cr.inford"; and Dr. Johnson at Ills worst'runs her close. What, on the other hand, are "clear" styles? Pre-eminently Arnold's own. Ho realised (with Mr. Ponderovo). that French is a very useful language—puts a point-on things" and, though critics have censured his stylo as too French, it makes, amends by being the perfection of lucidity. In my humble judgment, the greatest master of English prose in the Victorian age, was Cardinal Newman, and,, in his style, light and colour and music and all tho best treasures of our English tongue are joined with a crystallino clearness. Newman's closest disciple in tho realm of letters was ft. W. Church, Dean of St. Paul's—by Lord Morlcv pronouncod to bo the finest - flower of Oxford culture; and hia «tyla hna exactly

the same clearness as his master's, though the general texture of his prose is less rich and more austere. Every boy who uses his pen has to go through ■a period of Maeaulay. The History and tho Essays are imposed upon hitti, as Shakespeare, and Milton nrs imposed upon men. And for a few years wo think nothing so beautiful as Macatilav's trick of cutting up a paragraph into short, sTwirp sentences, and then rounding it off with a rhetorical thunder-roll. After three or four years of this apprenticeship, we pass on to masters at onco subtler and simpler; but from Mac.aulay wo have loarnt clearness. ILis judgments were often mistaken, and always prejudiced, but his mind was perfectly expressed in his writing. No human being could ever misunderstand a sentence that Maeaulay wrote: that was "the Style." "I wish," said one of his friends, "that I could bo as cocksure about anything as Tom Mficaulay is about everything"— that was "tho Man."

Perhaps we do not fully appreciate the full value of lucidity in sytle until we'are confronted with its opposite. Let 'anyone who wishes to know tho of which the English language is capable study the writings of the late Bishop Westcott, and then he will return with a fresh zest to tho "Aiologia," or "St. Paul and Protestantism." For the "strong" style, I could not refer my friend to a more perfect instance than William Cobbctt, worthily echoed in our own day in the Public Correspondence of John' Bright, who wrote thus concerning a slanderous opponent—"Ho may not know that lie is ignorant, but he cannot bo ignorant that ho lies. 1 think the speaker was named Smith, no is a discredit to the numerous family of that name." Of tho "racy" style—the style bubblng with fun and sarcasm, yet using each jok© to clinch nn argument—the supreme example is Sydney Smith. To have absorbed his "Essays" and the

"Letters of Peter PlymTey" is to have acquired an entirely new sense of the function of numour in serious controversy. ■

"Graceful" ij a rather more elastic word. Thackeray's was, methinks, a graceful style, drawing part of its grace from Latin and some from Trench. Fronde's writing, on other accounts to be detested, is admirable for grace. Dean Stanley, describing a landscape or a pageant, was graceful exactly where the back-writer is clumsiest and most ponderous; and Mr. Frederic Harrison, depicting an historical scene or building, disposes of the ridiculous superstation that leirnin~ and grace are incompatible.

Of the "Commonplace" stylo—Hi? style which is grammatically correct, but contains not n spark of distinction, interest, or character—we have indeed abundant examples nil around us. It has been cultivated with groat success by historical winters. It is seen to perfection in the historical works of the late Sir Spencer Walpolo. ilr. .T. E. Green's pictures and patches, Mr. Herbert Paul's epigrams and antitheses, are the vehement efforts of historians to shake themselves free from commonplace. . The "Distinguished" style must, be approached with reverence—especially by a writer who has onlv once attained to it —and in discussing it some cross-division is inevitable. Distinction is not incompatible with other virtu 3.5." Newman, Arnold, l'roude, and Stanley all wrote "distinguished" styles, though their special distinction may have lain in some particular quality, such as lucidity, or pictiiresqueness, or grace. Distinction may mean distinctiveness —the duality in a. style which makes one say, "This must be Sydney Smith," or "That certainly is Macaulay"; or elss it may mean what Matthew Arnold meant by "the Grand Style," and may therefore be common, to general writers of the highest rank. If this is what we mean by distinction, Gibbon's style was distinguished, and still more so Burke's—"the greatest man since Milton." Ituskin's style was in both senses distinguished. He- handled the English language as it had never been handled before, eliciting undreamed-of harmonies and visions of loveliness which, till he interpreted them, had escaped the ken of man. And, though his writing bears on every page the traces of tho laborious file, "it often attains the very height of rhetorical beauty. Prom tho days of Jeremy Taylor and Isaac Barrow the English pulpit has had a literature of its own. I doubt if anyone could nowadays read Henry Melvill, esteemed of Mr. Gladstone tho greatest preacher he had ever heard; but there are sermons of Liddon's—more especially those preached l>efore the University of Oxford—in which the "Grand Manner" of sacred eloquence is maintained in its. perfection. If by a '.'Distinguished" style/ W9 moan a style which at onco proclaims its authorship, which makes us say, "So-and-so and no one else wrote that," we find a striking instance in the style of the Rev. H. Scott Holland, Hegins Professor of Divinity at Oxford. I forbear to describe it except negatively—it is not "commonplace." But all this time I havo been, as it were, only skirmishing round my subject. Now I must grapple it. Who of writers now living is the greatest exponent of the "Distinguished" style. I answer, without hesitation, Lord Morley. Indeed he seems to me to stand alone. His style is beyond all others natural, easy, fluent, lucid. Here and thero it takes a turn which suggests foreign influence; but English prose, even in its greatest days, never was too proud to borrow additional adornment from a wider world. It is full of life and fire and colour; it moves to no ordered march, but just as it is swayed by the inspiration of the moment. It Keem-s to me to be tho one utterance now left to us which is a worthy vehicle of the highest and most solemn thinking. ■"The doubtful doom of human kind" may be a melancholy; bot it is an ennobling subject of contemplation, and he who has long gazed on it with clear eyes and a steady sonl will have learnt to think nobly, and to find words which match his thought.