Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/33

 Creek 27 of his countrymen to underrate the accomplishment of style, he remarks: 6 In no country upon earth, were it possible to carry such a maxim into practical effect, is it a more determinate tendency of the national mind to value the matter of a book, not only as paramount to the manner, but even as distinct from it, and as capable of a separate insulation. What first gave a shock to such a tendency, must have been the unwilling and mysterious sense that, in some cases, the matter and manner were so inextricably interwoven, as not to admit of this coarse bisection. The one was embedded, entangled, and inter- fused through the other in a way which bade defiance to such gross mechanical separations. Far along in this same essay occurs a passage which takes us to the very heart of the matter. After speaking of a social condition in which restless enthusiasm is combined with excessive leisure and scarcity^of books, DeQuincey continues: 7 Men living permanently under such influences must of mere necessity resort to that order of intellectual pursuits which requires little aid ab extra; that order, in fact, which philosophically is called 'subjective,' as drawing much from our own proper selves or little (if anything) from extraneous objects. . . . Such pursuits are peculiarly favorable to the culture of style. In fact, they force that culture. A man who has absolute facts to communicate from some branch of study, external to himself, as physiology, suppose, or anatomy, or astronomy, is careless of style; or at least he may be so, because he it independent of style, for what he has to communicate neither readily admits, nor much needs, any graces in the mode of communication: the matter transcends and oppresses the manner. The matter tells without any manner at all. But he who has to treat a vague question, such as Cicero calls a quaestio infinita, when everything has to be finished* out of his own peculiar feelings, or his own way of viewing things, (in contradistinction to a quaestio finita, where determinate data from without already furnish the main materials), soon finds that the manner of treating it not only transcends the matter, but very often and in a very great proportion, is the matter. This statement from DeQuincey's famous essay, the reader will note, makes style a peculiarity of a particular class of literature, and in such literature he identifies manner with matter. It should be noted perhaps that more than once previously style had been discussed in terms not so different from those of DeQuincey. 6 Works, vol. X,~pp. 137 f. 7 Ibid., p. 226. * "Apparently this word 'should be "furnished" to correspond with the "furnish"in the same sentence, but all theeditions I have been able to examine have "finished."