Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/32

 26 Philosophies of Style goods which are delivered, there may be a sense of pleasure in the graceful and expeditious handling. So, Kames would say, is one pleased at the efficient communication of insignificant matter. But let us press the matter further. Suppose the delivery truck had been made expressly to deliver one particular load to you, and that load was something you did not want. In that case I am quite sure that the pleasure in the efficiency of the delivery would not be present. Now this is precisely true of style. The style of a particular piece of prose is the style of that prose and no other, and so it must be judged. If the unpleasant matter is disregarded be- cause the style is agreeable, then Kames has failed to give what is the true explanation. Spencer would not accept Kames's explana- tion. There is no real economy if the matter communicated is not worth communicating. It may occur to the reader that there is another aspect of the analogy. The delivery truck may please because it may indicate by the manner in which it carries worthless objects that it may be used for really important service, and the style of a worthless essay may seem worthy of a better content. There is a bit of truth in this, but a style which may serve as a carry-all for the various articles in a department store of ideas, images, and emotions is not the style that Kames or any one else is thinking about. I have already indicated that Spencer's theory and the classica theory agree in distinguishing sharply between style and matter* The romanticists on the other hand, deny the distinction between matter and form which the classicists were so careful to assert. Wordsworth, Coleridge, 3 and Carlyle made statements which show the newer attitude. Wordsworth, we are told, called style "the incarnation of thought," 4 a statement which, according to DeQuincey, was the weightiest thing he had ever heard about style. And among the wise sayings of Teufelsdrockh is this: 5 "Language is called the Garment of Thought; however, it should rather be, Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of Thought. " But it was DeQuincey who crystallized the tendency into a clear theoreti- cal expression in his essay on " Style. " In discussing the tendency 3 See Biogr aphia Liter aria, ch. xviii. 5 Sartor Resartus, Book I, ch. xi.
 * See DeQuincey's Works (London, 1897), vol. X, pp. 229 f.