Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/357

Rh from the agency using it, and viewed more in relation to the reader's than the writer's mind. But there is another aspect of the relation, which cannot be left out without producing a result which must be one-sided, and may be inaccurate. The following pages will be an attempt to supply this omission by a consideration of the nature of the various devices of language, regarded as the outcome of the mind that employs them.

That "to have a specific style is to be poor in speech" has not been implied in the judgments which the world has from time to time passed upon its greatest writers. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that much in proportion as an author has reached a high eminence in his art, there has been found in his productions a corresponding tendency to an individuality of expression. Is it not a common complaint against inferior artists, whether in prose or verse, in painting or music, that their compositions lack character and originality? Uniformity is the distinguishing feature of mediocrity, while the work of genius is at once recognized and attributed to the origin whose impress it bears. And a little reflection will show that this is exactly what is meant by "style." Various tricks of voice, gesture, and dress, are associated by every one with his friends, glimpses of the hidden self being granted in such halt-unnoticed revelations. The chief value, indeed, of such peculiarities rests in the fact that they are commonly unknown to the man himself. For all of us, even the most sincere, are to a certain extent actors in our intercourse with others, and play a part that has been self-assigned, often without due pondering of the player's power. Nature, however, peeps out in countless little traits of character, which find their expression in language, habit, and even in movements. By what subtile union such tricks of manner are linked with what Dr. Johnson has called "the anfractuosities of the human mind," is a curious and intricate question, but no one will doubt the fact of the connection. "That's father!" cries the child as she hears the well-known foot-fall in the hall; "How like the man!" we exclaim, when some characteristic remark is reported to us. Spite of the progress in complexity from a sound to a sentiment, each obeys the same law; and the connection between the foot-fall and the foot, between the speech and the mind that conceived it, is one and the same.

Let us follow out the thought a little further. Not only, to put the fact in its popular aspect, has every one his peculiarities; but there are degrees of peculiarity accompanying degrees of individuality; as a man deviates in character from the type ordinarily met with, so are his habits singular to himself, till a point is reached where the personality is remarkable, and the behavior eccentric. Where such manners are perfectly unaffected they are a reflection of a self that stands alone among many, so that the common dictum, that genius is eccentric, has a philosophical foundation. There is no need to linger