Style

Part 1

Transcribed from the 1904 Edward Arnold edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

STYLE

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WALTER RALEIGH

AUTHOR OF ‘THE ENGLISH NOVEL,’ AND ‘ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, A CRITICAL ESSAY’

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FIFTH IMPRESSION

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LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD Publisher to the India Office 1904

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JOANNI SAMPSON

BIBLIOTHECARIO OPTIMO

VIRO OMNI SAPIENTIA ÆGYPTIORUM

ERUDITO

LABORUM ET ITINERUM SUORUM

SOCIO

HUNC LIBELLUM

D · D · D

AUCTOR

TABLE OF THE PRINCIPAL MATTERS CONTAINED IN THIS ESSAY

PAGE The Triumph of Letters 1 The Problem of Style 3 The Instrument and the Audience, with a Digression on the 4 Actor The Sense-Elements 8 The Functions of Sense 10 Picture 11 Melody 14 Meaning, Exampled in Negation 17 The Weapons of Thought 21 The Analogy from Architecture 23 The Analogy Rectified. The Law of Change 24 The Good Slang 27 The Bad Slang 29 Archaism 32 Romantic and Classic 36 The Palsy of Definition 39 Distinction 43 Assimilation 45 Synonyms 46 Variety of Expression 49 Variety Justified 50 Metaphor and Abstraction: Poetry and Science 55 The Doctrine of the Mot Propre 61 The Instrument 65 The Audience 65 The Relation of the Author to his Audience 71 The Poet and his Audience 71 Public Caterers 77 The Cautelous Man 78 Sentimentalism and Jocularity 81 The Tripe-Seller 83 The Wag 85 Social and Rhetorical Corruptions 87 Sincerity 88 Insincerity 93 Austerity 94 The Figurative Style 98 Decoration 100 Allusiveness 102 Simplicity and Strength 104 The Paradox of Letters 107 Drama 108 Implicit Drama 111 Words Again 115 Quotation 116 Appropriation 119 The World of Words 123 The Teaching of Style 124 The Conclusion 127

STYLE

STYLE, the Latin name for an iron pen, has come to designate the art that handles, with ever fresh vitality and wary alacrity, the fluid elements of speech. By a figure, obvious enough, which yet might serve for an epitome of literary method, the most rigid and simplest of instruments has lent its name to the subtlest and most flexible of arts. Thence the application of the word has been extended to arts other than literature, to the whole range of the activities of man. The fact that we use the word “style” in speaking of architecture and sculpture, painting and music, dancing, play-acting, and cricket, that we can apply it to the careful achievements of the housebreaker and the poisoner, and to the spontaneous animal movements of the limbs of man or beast, is the noblest of unconscious tributes to the faculty of letters. The pen, scratching on wax or paper, has become the symbol of all that is expressive, all that is intimate, in human nature; not only arms and arts, but man himself, has yielded to it. His living voice, with its undulations and inflexions, assisted by the mobile play of feature and an infinite variety of bodily gesture, is driven to borrow dignity from the same metaphor; the orator and the actor are fain to be judged by style. “It is most true,” says the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, “stylus virum arguit, our style bewrays us.” Other gestures shift and change and flit, this is the ultimate and enduring revelation of personality. The actor and the orator are condemned to work evanescent effects on transitory material; the dust that they write on is blown about their graves. The sculptor and the architect deal in less perishable ware, but the stuff is recalcitrant and stubborn, and will not take the impress of all states of the soul. Morals, philosophy, and æsthetic, mood and conviction, creed and whim, habit, passion, and demonstration—what art but the art of literature admits the entrance of all these, and guards them from the suddenness of mortality? What other art gives scope to natures and dispositions so diverse, and to tastes so contrarious? Euclid and Shelley, Edmund Spenser and Herbert Spencer, King David and David Hume, are all followers of the art of letters.

In the effort to explain the principles of an art so bewildering in its variety, writers on style have gladly availed themselves of analogy from the other arts, and have spoken, for the most part, not without a parable. It is a pleasant trick they put upon their pupils, whom they gladden with the delusion of a golden age, and perfection to be sought backwards, in arts less complex. The teacher of writing, past master in the juggling craft of language, explains that he is only carrying into letters the principles of counterpoint, or that it is all a matter of colour and perspective, or that structure and ornament are the beginning and end of his intent. Professor of eloquence and of thieving, his winged shoes remark him as he skips from metaphor to metaphor, not daring to trust himself to the partial and frail support of any single figure. He lures the astonished novice through as many trades as were ever housed in the central hall of the world’s fair. From his distracting account of the business it would appear that he is now building a monument, anon he is painting a picture (with brushes dipped in a gallipot made of an earthquake); again he strikes a keynote, weaves a pattern, draws a wire, drives a nail, treads a measure, sounds a trumpet, or hits a target; or skirmishes around his subject; or lays it bare with a dissecting knife; or embalms a thought; or crucifies an enemy. What is he really doing all the time?

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Besides the artist two things are to be considered in every art,—the instrument and the audience; or, to deal in less figured phrase, the medium and the public. From both of these the artist, if he would find freedom for the exercise of all his powers, must sit decently aloof. It is the misfortune of the actor, the singer, and the dancer, that their bodies are their sole instruments. On to the stage of their activities they carry the heart that nourishes them and the lungs wherewith they breathe, so that the soul, to escape degradation, must seek a more remote and difficult privacy. That immemorial right of the soul to make the body its home, a welcome escape from publicity and a refuge for sincerity, must be largely foregone by the actor, who has scant liberty to decorate and administer for his private behoof an apartment that is also a place of business. His ownership is limited by the necessities of his trade; when the customers are gone, he eats and sleeps in the bar-parlour. Nor is the instrument of his performances a thing of his choice; the poorest skill of the violinist may exercise itself upon a Stradivarius, but the actor is reduced to fiddle for the term of his natural life upon the face and fingers that he got from his mother. The serene detachment that may be achieved by disciples of greater arts can hardly be his, applause touches his personal pride too nearly, the mocking echoes of derision infest the solitude of his retired imagination. In none of the world’s great polities has the practice of this art been found consistent with noble rank or honourable estate. Christianity might be expected to spare some sympathy for a calling that offers prizes to abandonment and self-immolation, but her eye is fixed on a more distant mark than the pleasure of the populace, and, as in gladiatorial Rome of old, her best efforts have been used to stop the games. Society, on the other hand, preoccupied with the art of life, has no warmer gift than patronage for those whose skill and energy exhaust themselves on the mimicry of life. The reward of social consideration is refused, it is true, to all artists, or accepted by them at their immediate peril. By a natural adjustment, in countries where the artist has sought and attained a certain modest social elevation, the issue has been changed, and the architect or painter, when his health is proposed, finds himself, sorely against the grain, returning thanks for the employer of labour, the genial host, the faithful husband, the tender father, and other pillars of society. The risk of too great familiarity with an audience which insists on honouring the artist irrelevantly, at the expense of the art, must be run by all; a more clinging evil besets the actor, in that he can at no time wholly escape from his phantasmal second self. On this creature of his art he has lavished the last doit of human capacity for expression; with what bearing shall he face the exacting realities of life? Devotion to his profession has beggared him of his personality; ague, old age and poverty, love and death, find in him an entertainer who plies them with a feeble repetition of the triumphs formerly prepared for a larger and less imperious audience. The very journalist—though he, too, when his profession takes him by the throat, may expound himself to his wife in phrases stolen from his own leaders—is a miracle of detachment in comparison; he has not put his laughter to sale. It is well for the soul’s health of the artist that a definite boundary should separate his garden from his farm, so that when he escapes from the conventions that rule his work he may be free to recreate himself. But where shall the weary player keep holiday? Is not all the world a stage?

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