Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/111

Rh have been called precious are hardly perceptible as such. That of the late Mr. Pater, for instance, has been so blamed; and probably some who so criticise it will contend that in his case the word is rightly applied, and that in the three other cases above discussed it is not. Carlyle and Browning and Mr. Swinburne, it may be said, are mannerists, not précieux. Mr. Pater's style, it may be said, is really precious. But this, I would answer, is a misconception arising from a one-sided idea of the nature of preciosity. There is no constant radical difference between mannerism and preciosity; but a writer may be mannered without being precious. Normal speech is tolerant of mere manner; it is either the apparent consciousness of a need to speak abnormally, or a self-absorption too complete to realise how far its utterance varies from the normal — it is one or other of these aberrations that constitutes preciosity. And it is finally true that on the one hand all special self-absorption, and on the other hand all anxiety to write in a noticeable and unusual way, tend in the direction of preciosity. Dickens s manner often approaches it; and perhaps there is a faint suspicion of it even in the delicate concern of Thackeray to be exquisitely simple, to avoid Dickens's over-ambitious way. A certain unconsciousness is the last grace of a good style. And this being so, there may be just an occasional savour of preciosity in the extreme preoccupation of Mr. Pater with his. This had the surprising result of making him commit oversights which a less anxious craftsman could hardly have fallen into — for instance, his way of running a favourite epithet to death, as when he introduces the adjective "comely," in one or other secondary or metaphorical sense, some five or six times in a few dozen pages; and the syntax of some of the more elaborate sentences in one of his last volumes gave openings to fault-finding. But Mr. Pater's style is in the main so fastidiously Rh