Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/121

Rh perfect samples of 'style.' The fact is, that of style in the sense known to Sophokles or Milton, Shakespeare and Homer had little, and Dante had less. Shakespeare achieves his unique effects through a verbal magic unequalled in the world's literature. No man ever created such lines and phrases. Dante (to take his case alone) wins by something quite different—by a sheer and simple sincerity of outlook. He watches, and watches, and watches, till he sees things before him with an actuality that burns achingly into his sight, and what he sees he puts down simply—as he sees it; but style in the sense of Sophokles, verbal magic in the sense of Shakespeare, he has little or none of either.

Our business here is obviously with things on a smaller scale, but the same line of judgment must be held as with those of the largest. No one can claim for Mr. Kipling the possession of a real prose style, or, indeed, of anything approaching to it. He cannot even, at least in this respect, for a moment be placed beside his French contemporaries and fellow-story-tellers—Maupassant and Bourget, let alone the great names of French and English prose. Such style, quâ style, as he has is mere journalistic smartness, and he never begins to do good work till he has consciously forgotten all about it, and has set himself down to paint his 'pictures' or express his emotions as he