Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/718

708  of style, for there is no style at all.

Before going any further, it may be well to adopt a commendable, if antiquated and scholastic practice, and to set down accurately what is here meant by style, and of what it consists. Style is the choice and arrangement of language with only a subordinate regard to the meaning to be conveyed. Its parts are the choice of the actual words to be used, the further selection and juxtaposition of these words, the structure of the clauses into which they are wrought, the arrangement of the clauses into sentences, and the composition of the sentences into paragraphs. Beyond the paragraph style can hardly be said to go, but within that limit it is supreme. The faults incident to these parts (if I may be allowed still to be scholastic) are perhaps also worthy of notice. Every one can see, though every one is by no means careful to put his knowledge into practice, that certain words are bad of themselves, and certain others to be avoided wherever possible. The mere grammar of style teaches us not to say "commence" where we can say "begin," or "reliable" where we can say "trustworthy." The next stage introduces difficulties of a higher order, though these also are more or less elementary. Most people can see the faults in the following sentences: —

"Had he always written upon the level we behold here there could be little question that the author would have taken his place amongst the front rank of dramatists." Here "writing upon the level we behold here" is a combination of the most obviously incongruous notions. Again, "They did reject him of course, but his speech remains as a model for all true men to follow, as a warning to all who may adopt another course," etc. Here the unintentional repetition of the word course in an entirely different sense within the compass of a couple of lines is unpardonable. But these are mere rudiments; it is in the breach or neglect of the rules that govern the structure of clauses, of sentences, and of paragraphs that the real secret of style consists, and to illustrate this breach or observation is less easy. The task will be perhaps made easier if we consider first in the rough how the prevalent English style of the present day differs from that of past times.

Some five-and-thirty years ago De Quincey had already noticed and deplored the deterioration of which we speak. In his essay on style (reprinted in the sixth volume of his collected works) he undertakes to discuss at some length the symptoms and causes of the disease. De Quincey, as any one who is at all acquainted with his works is aware, gave considerable attention to the subject of style, and professed to be no mean authority thereon. There were, indeed, two peculiarities about him which prevented him from deserving a very high place as a referee on such matters. The first was his mistaken idea that extremely ornate prose — the prose which his ally John Wilson called "numerous," and which others have called Asiatic — was the highest form attainable, and that any writer who did not aim at this fell naturally into a lower class. The other was his singular crotchetisms, which made him frequently refuse to see any good in the style of writers to whom, for some reason or for no reason, he had taken a dislike. It will probably be allowed, not merely by persons who hold traditional opinions, but by all independent students of literature, that we must look with considerable distrust on the dicta of a critic who finds fault with the styles of Plato and of Conyers Middleton. The essay on style, however (at least its first part, for the latter portions go off into endless digressions of no pertinence whatever), is much more carefully written and much more carefully reasoned than most of De Quincey's work. The purport of it is, that the decay of style is to be attributed partly to the influence of German literature, but chiefly to the prevalence of journalism. No one will deny that the influence of newspaper-writing is in many ways had, and that to it is due much of the decadence in style of which complaint is made. But either the prevalent manner of journalism has undergone a remarkable change during the past generation, or else the particular influence which De Quincey supposes it to have had